I got the new laptop.  It's an Averatec 5110H (http://www.averatec.com/archives/5110series.htm)
What's really interesting is that SuSE (http://www.suse.com) 9.2 tried to do the graphical
installation, but it didn't show up correctly.  It was mostly a
black screen and unreadable.  SuSE (http://www.suse.com) 9.1 defaulted to text-ncurses
installation, and it worked.

Everything here worked out of the box except for two things:

1. Suspend - because apparently SuSE (http://www.suse.com) disables it by default, which
makes sense because it's not a laptop distribution , which I'd like to
comment on later.
2. Wireless - because Averatec made a stupid button to turn their
wireless on and off.  You're probably thinking, Dude, isn't that
a good thing?   Well, it would be except that their little button
is controlled by software drivers (Windows only) and not by the
hardware itself.

So, to enable suspend, I simply went into /etc/powersave.conf and edited this line:

POWERSAVED_DISABLE_USER_SUSPEND=yes to read no

To fix the wireless, I had to rip out my hair for a long time (my beard
hair, mind you).  OK, so some dude, bless his heart, came up with
a linux software kernel (http://www.kernel.org/) module specifically for this brand of laptop to
turn it on, as well as a few other laptops that have this stupid
feature.  The project is called RFSWITCH (http://rfswitch.sourceforge.net/) because of the radio switch that must be enabled.

Wireless now works fine, and I am currently typing this from a wireless location.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 4:37 am and is filed under Afterthought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.