Linux on Laptops

Installing SUSE Linux 10.1 64-bit on Gateway 7510GX

Last updated: September 15 2006

General Hardware Specifications of Gateway 7510GX:

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
AMD Athlon 64-bit 2.4 GHZ	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
15.4 inch Widescreen	Works	Works Beautifully, picked up the widescreen right away.
ATI Mobility 9600 (X600) 128/256 MB	Works	Works, but I recommend getting the ATI Drivers
1GB Ram	Works	No special procedure required during installation
100 GB Fujisu Hard Drive	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Firewire	Not Tested	Not Tested, Don't Use
Integrated Network Card	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Internal 56k Modem	Not Tested	Not Tested
Dual Layer DVD Burner	Works	No special procedure required during installation, reads discs fine, haven't tried burning yet.
Broadcom 4318 802.11b/g Wireless adapter	Works	Requires Ndiswrapper and Drivers; instructions below.
6 cell Lithium-Ion Battery	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Sound Card/Speakers	Works	Just turn off the external amplifier in KMix.
PCMCIA Card Drive	Not Tested	Don't have any cards.
SD/CF Card Reader	Not Tested	Don't have any cards.

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.16.21-0.13-default

Installation Notes:

My goal was to set up for dual boot with Windows (I'm a wimp, I know, but still do need Windows for stuff =P). I partitioned the hard drive with partition magic, but I had to defragment and run chkdsk (with the fixing options checked) to get it to partition properly. I kept the Windows Partition, the Recovery partition, The Linux OS Partition (ext3, ReiserFS), and a Data Partition (fat32).

SUSE Linux 10.1 (openSUSE) is a nice distro with lots of stuff included. I've heard of people having trouble with it on certain computers, which is probably true, but from my experience, it runs well on this laptop. Very speedy, 64-bit OS on a 64-bit processor. I downloaded the DVD edition of SUSE and burned it with CD Burner XP Pro. The installation went very smoothly, and the dual boot configured itself (!), which was nice after having a painful experience seven years ago with an old red had distro, heh. KDE popped up and greeted me nicely. I STRONGLY suggest you read the “Hacking openSUSE 10.1” article by Jem Matzan, a link is provided at the end, it's great!

WiFi:

A pain in the neck, but worth it to get it working. Download and Install Ndiswrapper off of YaST. You'll need the Broadcom Drivers. I can't remember which ones worked but they were from here -> http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List. Try a few and when I remember for sure I'll post that. Use the ndiswrapper commands to install the driver and modprobe ndiswrapper (as root). You can then also add ndiswrapper to be loaded on startup, I'll post instructions for that soon. At this point if I wanted to connect I had to do this:

Allow KNetworkManager to load and attempt to connect. It fails.
Go into KWifiManager, scan for networks, find the Network, change WEP to "off".
Hit "Switch to Network". Will not connect, but Kwifimanager will go to Ad-hoc mode.
THEN, attempt to connect (again) with KNetworkManager.

I then turned on WPA-Personal on my router and used KNetworkManager to add all the details and store them in a wallet. This prevented all of the kwifimanager stuff. Just start Linux, select the Wireless Network, enter the wallet password and your a go. Still, I would like to figure out how to automate this.

Tv-Out/Video Out:

You need the ATI Drivers for this. From a console, run aticonfig. Then there will be a bunch of option listed. It may take a combination of several to get the desired results, but it will work the same in Windows. When I get all of the commands in a list, I'll post it.

Still Working On:

Suspend isn't working properly, either to disk or ram. Gotta get that up and running.

A Nice Note: My scrollbar on my touchpad only ever worked erratically under Windows. It is very smooth on Linux and works great all the time!

Contact Information

You can drop me a line at tronman@gmail.com

Links:

OpenSUSE – http://en.opensuse.org
CD Burner XP Pro -> http://www.cdburnerxp.se
ATI site for drivers -> http://www.ati.com
Hacking openSUSE -> http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/254/42/
And of course, back to Linux on Laptops!

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