Mandrake 10.0 on a Compal CY-23 notebook

 

            PIII @ 1.13GHZ

            128MB pc133 onboard, additional 128MB sodimm addon

            30GB 4200rpm hdd

            S3 Savage4 Twister graphics onboard, 8-32MB shared ram

            15.1” 1024x768@60Hz TFT

            VIA PN133(VT8603) for North Bridge and VT686B for South Bridge

            Matsushita (Panasonic) 8x4x24 cdrw

            Floppy drive

            Li-on battery (about 90 minutes life under XP, about 2.5 hours with mandrake and lcd backlight off)

            Accton 10/100 nic/winmodem

            2 pcmcia slots (OZ6933 Card-bus controller)

          Alps touchpad

            2 USB 1.1 ports

            Headphone out, mic in, AC97 codec

            1 mini 4 pin 1394 port (firewire)

            1 ps2 port

            15pin vga out

            s-vid out

            1 parallel

 

Outboard gear:

                                                                                                  Kensington pocket mouse (usb, scroll wheel optical)

                                                                                                  Linksys wpc11 v.4 (Realtek 8180 chipset) pcmcia wireless nic (home)

                                                                                                  Proxim Skyline 802.11a pcmcia wireless nic (school)

 

Weird little switch to enable direct playback of audio cd through either speakers of headphones with system shut down

 (useful for ejecting forgotten cd-roms)

 

 

 

We received these notebooks in fall, 2002 upon entering a 2 year program at a small community/business college in Dayton, Ohio. In our 2nd summer of classes, we had a prep course for the Linux+ exam as an elective. Many people with these boxes failed miserably at trying to install various distro’s. My first attempt was RH7.3, then Fedora 1(wouldn’t even boot), and I finally reverted to mandrake 9.1. Realizing I had partitioned badly, I then wiped it with a mandrake 9.2 fresh install. I had issues with the cardbus controller under the 2.4x kernels. I also would get a usb controller hang on reboots, but a hard boot didn’t produce this problem. I then did an upgrade to Mandrake 10.0 after having problems with a pcmcia wireless card. The 2.6 kernel worked like a charm. Using the ndiswrapper project and the Realtek 8180 drivers has enabled a solid 802.11b connection. My only unresolved problems are that the usb mouse stops working when the 802.11b pcmcia card is enabled, and that I can’t seem to get the system to recognize the 802.11a card. As a result, I now have a dual boot XP/Mandrake 10 set up with LILO, 14GB each.

 

ACPI functions quite well, USB memory devices mount even with pcmcia card enabled.  Video is great in 2D mode; just don’t try to play tuxacer. Even with 32MB of ram allocated to video, it puts out ~2 fps.

 

Overall, this box is suitable for both Mandrake 10, and the latest versions of most live cd distro’s. Fedora killed a few windows partitions amongst my classmates. Red Hat just didn’t want to install right. Knoppix, and the Penguin Sleuth cd’s both booted just fine. I even did a hddinstall from the penguin sleuth cd on a classmate’s notebook after Fedora and grub killed his XP MBR. I have yet to try a MandrakeMove cd, but I will append this page after I give it a go.

 

Michael J. Getz (A+, Network+)

NmOgSePtAzM@cinci.rr.com

Mandrake
ndiswrapper project
Linuxquestion forums discussion on the linksys wpc11 v.4