| Hostname: | ares |
| Model: | L8400B |
| CPU: | PIII/650 |
| RAM: | 128Mb builtin + 128 Mb PC100 SDRAM (SO-DIMM) expansion |
| IO system: | Single IDE channel |
| Storage: | 40gb IBM Travelstar 40GN (IC25N040ATCS04-0) MATSHITA SR-8175 DVD drive Builtin 1.44Mb Floppy drive |
| Graphics: | S3 Savage/MX, 8MB RAM |
| Console: | 84-key DK keyboard 2 button touchpad 14.1" TFT LCD panel, 1024x768 resolution |
| Sound: | Aureal Vortex 8810 Audio, mic in, line out, speaker out |
| Network: | Realtek 8139B mini-pci |
| Case: | Laptop |
| OS (current): | Fedora Core 2 Windows XP |
| Wanted: |
The Aureal soundchip is only supported by a closed-source binary driver released by Aureal. The glue-code has been updated to work with newer kernels and it works fine with 2.4.18. I'm worried about 2.5/2.6 though since it's been planned to replace OSS with ALSA in the kernel.
The Hitach harddrive suddenly reported bad sectors so I decided to get an upgrade. The IBM Travelstar is a bit quieter since it has fluid bearings.
Well it turned out that the Hitachi is okay after all. Running Hitachi's own diskscan tool corrected the bad sectors and now reports the disk errorfree. I guess I could put it in one of those external USB boxes as a handy little data carrier.
Work on a free driver for the Aureal 88x0 series is now progressing nicely. See http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/openvortex for more information.
I upgraded the machine from Redhat Linux 9 to Fedora Core 2 when it came out. It works fine on this machine but the first FC2 kernel had a broken Aureal ALSA driver and needed patching. The latest FC2 errata kernels work out of the box.
While FC2 will attempt to use ACPI with this laptop I'd recommend disabling it by passing acpi=off as a kernel parameter. The reason is that APM is working well on this machine so the headache of ACPI is unnecessary.
If you want to access the speedstep functionality you can put this:
options speedstep_smi smi_port=0xb2 smi_cmd=0x82 smi_sig=1
In /etc/modprobe.conf and then modprobe the speedstep_smi driver.