Bret Baptist wrote:
> I purchased a custom built HP nc6000 recently.  I love it.  Everything except 
> suspend/hibernate is working.  The only reason this doesn't work is because 
> of the crappy ATI drivers for Linux.

I've actually come full circle from being a strong advocate of ATI
for Linux to now favoring nVidia.  Building the nVidia kernel modules
in debian is quick and painless... and much more likely to work
for things like TV-out (than the open source ATI drivers).  Getting the
proprietary ATI drivers to work requires using a down-rev'd X config.

Last summer I purchased an HP zd7260us (from Circuit City)....  and ended
up using the nv driver until I recently rebuilt the nVidia drivers for 2.6.9.
Now I've got glx working again!!! (glxgears - 2114 fps).
The driver is still 'flaky' in that it doesn't exit cleanly...
And, due to other changes in ALSA (I think), the sound driver stopped
working... but based on the Changelog for 2.6.10 I suspect this will
be fixed.

I don't have the 802.11g card working (with ndiswrapper) yet, but
I know others have managed to get this to work.

It's really nice having 1680x1050 pixels to work with!  And it's
interesting that when running the SMP kernel it's actually hard
to keep both HT contexts busy!

I can dual boot this machine into XP (but rarely do).
The best recipe I found was to use a recovery CD to shrink the NTFS
partition, then make new partitions for the Linux install....

The ntfsresize Frequently Asked Questions
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html

My only additions to the standard procedure are to do these things first:
1. Remove any software (adware, spyware, M$ware) and data
   you will not need.
2. De-frag the C: drive
3. Do a
   C:\> chkdsk /f
   and then reboot into Windows to insure the filesystem is
   is consistent.
   http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#chkdsk
4. Boot to the recovery CD and proceed to do ntfsresize
   (I usually make a FAT32 partition for Linux to write data
   that I want to share with Windows....  I haven't tried
   mounting NTFS for r/w in Linux)

My favorite recovery disk currently is (note this has the latest
ntfsresize):
   "Recovery is Possible"
   http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/

Jay wrote:
> I dual boot XP and Debian on my Dell Inspiron 8100 without any issues.
>  All depends on the hardware, though. Some of the newer Dell's might
> have something unexpected.

I'm currently using my old Dell 8100 as a MythTV front end (because
TV-out works!).  I found that running the i8kmon utilities was necessary
to insure the fans keep the machine cool.

HTH,

--Tom

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