On 12/27/05, Hans du Plooy
Hi guys,
Does anyone have this notebook? I have the PY416EA model - it is a Turion64 1.8ghz, with Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE).
I'm having a few problems:
1. Onboard Wireless: Broadcom BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] - it doesn't have a linux driver. I set up ndiswrapper, and that works fine, but it is junk - poor reception, poor performance, unstable. But I can live with that, for now. The problem is, when I do network intensive stuff, like copy big files, the notebook sometimes reboot. Not reset, just a normal reboot as if I typed "reboot" in the cli.
Haven't got it to work "right" with ndiswrapper yet. Other projects required my time and had to set it aside for the time.
2. Booting hangs at the "loading keymap" or something like that bit. When that happens I press the wireless/bluetooth button twice (switch off + switch on) and it continues to boot normally.
I didn't have this problem with the laptops my company bought. Did have a problem with the Synaptic touchpad driver.
3. PCMCIA - doesn't work at all. It's a normal well supported controller, uses the yenta driver. But when you stick something into it, it simply doesn't pick it up. I really want to use my Netgear PCMCIA wireless card (see #1 above). I have verified with a knoppix CD that the socket does work. In SUSE, I've fiddled around, tried various combinations of inserting and removing modules and restarting coldplug, dbus etc and got it working once, but I could never repeat that. The relevant lspci info: CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller
I'll have to get a PCMCIA card and try this. Don't really have a reason since most ports and devices I need are on the laptop.
4. ACPI doesn't work well. the CPU heats up to about 75 degrees celcius before the fan comes on. Sometimes the fan doesn't switch off. The different powersave profiles doesn't work correctly either. On "performance" it sticks to 1800mhz, on anything els it sits on 800mhz. I would expect that on "dynamic" it should raise the CPU speed if I compile something or do something CPU intensive, but it doesn't. I have fiddled endlessly with the options, modifying the profiles, to no avail.
Agree. The cpu fan does run constantly and this thing will drain the battery fast.
All of the above problems exist in both the 32bit and 64bit versions of SUSE 10.0.
One more question:
The notebook has a biometric sensor. Has anyone worked with such hardware? Could you please point me to good documentation? It would be nice to play around with this too.
As soon as my projects get finished (hopefully end of January) I'll get back to working with this laptop.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Hans
P.S. A few observations, for anyone in the market: this particular model is a lot of computer for the money. Display is 1400x1050 (only on the top model) and very clear. The modem is an ATI device and is supported (by alsa, of all things). Network is gigabit and works well. Performance is very strong, especially when compiling stuff. And lastly, the sound chip, also ATI, is by far the best sound I've heard from any onboard sound. It has the sweetness and roundness of the Soundblaster Live cards. Very very nice! If the wireless doesn't bother you (the only non-SUSE problem I have), it's a great buy, good value for money, and a very nice and solid notebook.
Agree. This laptop is very good and my company was able to get them for under $1,000 ea. They came with a gig of RAM (shared with video) and 80GB hdd. My only real complaint is the display is rather dark and dull if you have ever used one of HP laptops with Brightview screen. Nice to know someone else is kicking this laptop around with Linux. When my projects finish up, I'll try SuSE 10 again and maybe Ubuntu as well. I had better luck with Ubuntu on my Sony Vaio when SuSE and Red Hat balked. John