Laptop Fun. And.. Suse rules.
New laptop => wasted days.
Ever since my parents got me a new laptop on the weekend, I've been messing around with it. When I got back to Waterloo on Sunday evening, it was partitioned in preparation for a dual boot system. This involved the installation of Windows XP Pro as well as much hassle in installing some form of Linux.
To say the least.. none of the (very few) Debian based distributions I tried seemed to properly detect the touchpad and keyboard for the laptop. With Knoppix both keyboard and mouse would be frozen. However, turning off ACPI seems to get the keyboard working again. I tried some touchpad drivers (Synaptics and Alps) and neither seemed to do the trick. Popping the Ubuntu CD into the drive resulted in frozen keyboards and touchpad/mouse as well. Whee! I didn't try turning off ACPI in this case. Instead, I went on to try Suse. That seemed to do the trick. After fussing around with some configurations, everything seems to be just peachy. I didn't have to fuck with anything to get keyboard or touchpad working. After all those hours of fucking with the various Debian distributions (mostly Knoppix), I spent just 30 min installing Suse and maybe another 30 min to an hour to update to KDE 3.4. All in all, that's not too bad.
I should, however, gripe about the installation script for Knoppix. Sigh. The script checks to see if certain requirements are satisfied. Such requirements included having a free partition with 2GB of space along with a strongly suggested minimum of 256MB swap partition. Both partitions existsed. Indeed, there was a 19GB partition free for installation along with a 1GB partition for the swap. Detected? Nope. Instead, it just kept whining and opening qtparted or something like that. In the end, frustrated with this idiocy, I just used IGNORE_CHECK=1 and told it where to install the damned thing. Anyway, all that for naught since the keyboard and touchpad didn't work with the 2.6 kernel anyway.
Anyway, I should probably stop playing around with the laptop and actually get to sleep at some decent times so that I'll be rested enough to study for finals. At this rate, I probably won't retain anything. Oh well. Off to bed for me, then.
Ever since my parents got me a new laptop on the weekend, I've been messing around with it. When I got back to Waterloo on Sunday evening, it was partitioned in preparation for a dual boot system. This involved the installation of Windows XP Pro as well as much hassle in installing some form of Linux.
To say the least.. none of the (very few) Debian based distributions I tried seemed to properly detect the touchpad and keyboard for the laptop. With Knoppix both keyboard and mouse would be frozen. However, turning off ACPI seems to get the keyboard working again. I tried some touchpad drivers (Synaptics and Alps) and neither seemed to do the trick. Popping the Ubuntu CD into the drive resulted in frozen keyboards and touchpad/mouse as well. Whee! I didn't try turning off ACPI in this case. Instead, I went on to try Suse. That seemed to do the trick. After fussing around with some configurations, everything seems to be just peachy. I didn't have to fuck with anything to get keyboard or touchpad working. After all those hours of fucking with the various Debian distributions (mostly Knoppix), I spent just 30 min installing Suse and maybe another 30 min to an hour to update to KDE 3.4. All in all, that's not too bad.
I should, however, gripe about the installation script for Knoppix. Sigh. The script checks to see if certain requirements are satisfied. Such requirements included having a free partition with 2GB of space along with a strongly suggested minimum of 256MB swap partition. Both partitions existsed. Indeed, there was a 19GB partition free for installation along with a 1GB partition for the swap. Detected? Nope. Instead, it just kept whining and opening qtparted or something like that. In the end, frustrated with this idiocy, I just used IGNORE_CHECK=1 and told it where to install the damned thing. Anyway, all that for naught since the keyboard and touchpad didn't work with the 2.6 kernel anyway.
Anyway, I should probably stop playing around with the laptop and actually get to sleep at some decent times so that I'll be rested enough to study for finals. At this rate, I probably won't retain anything. Oh well. Off to bed for me, then.