The gist is that I bought a Tatung WXGA laptop from Walmart.com. It came with WinXP on it, as well as some Redhat derivative that was on a "hidden" partition. Probably that was the rescue partition.<\/p>\n
EIther way, I reformatted the entire disk and first tried to install the most recent Fedora Core. The FC install CD would not boot on this laptop. (Kernel panic during boot.)<\/p>\n
So I tried installing Ubuntu linux, about which I had also heard good things. It installed clean and worked just about perfectly the first time. It detected the unusual screen geometry (1280×820) and the wireless network card just fine. I haven’t tried using USB or Firewire devices yet. Sound and 3D graphics seemed to work fine. I’m not sure if I tested Xvideo. or not.<\/p>\n
The minor issue I had were that Ubuntu includes hibernate scripts for suspending to RAM and to disk on ACPI events. If you want to suspend to disk, you need to include ‘resume=\/dev\/hda5’ into the grub config, assuming that hda5 is your swap partition. I assume that the swap partition must be as large as the RAM, also. It also had some issue where on resume it would not restore to the correct Virtual Terminal. I recognized what it was doing, and could hit Ctl-Alt-F7, to fix it, but many Linux folks would not be so sophisticated to figure this out. I added a line somewhere to force a change back to VT7.<\/p>\n
This seemed to work fine at first. About a week or two into using the laptop, Ubuntu offered a package upgade to the kernel. After installing it, the laptop would only suspend once – subsequent suspends would power down and then immediately resume. There were messsages in dmesg about problems with the ohci1394 driver, which I assume was causing the problem. I blacklisted that driver, since I’m not using any firewire\/ieee1394 devices with that laptop currently. I’m not sure if that fixed the problem or not yet, since I have so little time to mess with it because of my two small children. <\/p>\n
Anyway, for anyone else who’s considering the Walmart Tatung WXGA laptop for use with Linux, it worked almost perfectly out-of-the-box for me. (modulo problems described above).
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Placeholder to fill in later. The gist is that I bought a Tatung WXGA laptop from Walmart.com. It came with WinXP on it, as well as some Redhat derivative that was on a "hidden" partition. Probably that was the rescue partition. EIther way, I reformatted the entire disk and first tried to install the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1202,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions\/1202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}