[ILUG] aldi laptop....

[Ruairi Hickey]

Hi all,
	I queued with all the other bargain hunters for a laptop last week and 
thought I'd post a review for anyone else that purchased / is going to 
purchase one.

	The laptop is more accurately a portable desktop given it's features, limited 
battery life - looks like approx 2+ hours on linux although I haven't tested 
this fully....

The laptop has an intel chipset, p4 3.06HT cpu, nvidia geforce fx-go5600, 60GB 
HD, 512MB ram onboard ethernet / modem / firewire / usb2 / synaptics mousepad 
sound etc... and came with a real XP home CD and a drivers / utilities cd, 
works and other utilities

Wiped the install and repartitioned the disk as follows
	8 GB	FreeBSD
	10GB	XP Home
	5GB		Debian
	ext 
	128MB	gentoo /boot
	256MB	gentoo swap
	10GB	gentoo root
	25GB	fat32 data partitiion.

Gentoo is my main distro and it installed perfectly... using 2.6.3 kernel and 
the network card (natsemi) pcmciq, acpi, firewire etc is all working.  
Downloaded the latest smlink driver, patched it to support smp and it 
compiled and worked well... it comes with a kernel module for the serial port 
and a userland daemon which works as a modem.  The nvidia card is working 
with the latest closed drivers at 1400x1050.  The synaptics driver emerged as 
well and supports tapping etc.  kde 3.2 is functioning well - although the 
power / battery indicator doesn't register when you plug in / out the power 
although the battery displays correctly.  Sound functions well and I haven't 
tested the DVD burner yet although I assume k3b will work well in ATAPI mode.

Ruairi