Hint: Hit "Reload" from time to time for best updating.

Updated June 18, 2001 with the results of a simple memory benchmark test.
Comment May 15, 2001 that RedHat 7.1 is pretty darn terrific - with unmodified 7.1 everything works fine with the Acer - USB, PCMCIA, sound, video card, CD writer etc. KDE 2 is also very nice and a nice improvement over the older version.
Updated April 25, 2001 to report success in installing a generic IBM TravelStar 20GB GN20 harddrive in the notebook. See "New Harddisk Installation" below.
Updated January 17, 2001, with the news that the lucent winmodem will now work - at least it works fine with the 2.4.0 (and 2.4.2) kernel. Yippee! See The Crazy Winmodem below.
Updated January 8, 2001, with instructions on how to make a rescue/boot CD, including a rescue ISO image that you can download and burn for your own use.

A second website on the ACER 600TER now may be found here.

Preliminaries:
      I bought the ACER 600TER for several reasons. It had generally great reviews on a number of sites (e.g. zdnet and sundry customer reviews there.) The price at Buy.com was competitive (close to $2K). The ACER notebook computers seemed to have components that were well supported by Linux: Linux Laptop pages and the single ACER 600 series linux installation info site at 602TER. I looked hard at cheaper, smaller notebooks like the Sharp Actius A280 or the IBM Thinkpad 240 (which sell for around $1000), but it seemed that for the weaknesses in the performance of those (cpu speed, disk size, battery lifetime, video memory, screen size and resolution) and the fact that the cost of the additional components (memory, additional batteries, CDROM) pushes the cost of these notebooks up towards the latest models at around $2K, made them seem not worth it. The ACER 600 series are slightly larger than these and weigh around 5 lbs (4 lb 11 oz.=4.7 lbs with the modular, standard CD-RW removed.) The battery lifetime is reputed to be 4-5 hrs which is close to what I have experienced. The cpu is a PIII 600 MHz speed step for nice energy efficiency. Ethernet and winmodem are standard built in. ACER had a deal whereby with a purchase of the 600TER one gets 64MB of RAM or a docking station free (my EasyPort docking station arrived the week of Sept. 27th - it works great). No floppy drive, however, but I use floppy drives infrequently. The extra cost for the 602TER did not seem worth it; the only difference being the CPU speed (650 MHz) and an additional 64 MB of RAM (more on RAM below). I liked the CD-RW for data archiving, although I may get the DVD player for it later.
     The size of the notebook was appealing - the width is about 9.4" which means it will fit in my briefcase. There are a number of notebooks with the 14.1" screen that sell for $2-2.5K and weigh 5-6+lbs, but the larger screen makes for a width an inch wider than the 600TER. That extra inch means the notebook would not fit in my brief case and probably spells for more trouble while trying to work on an airplane.
      The notebook does get fairly hot underneath - it probably is best to have the notebook propped up slightly for better cooling underneath. This is not to say that the notebook is excessively hot underneath (it is quite warm, however), it merely reflects my belief that computer components are happier when cool. Some of the heat percolates up through the keyboard, so my fingers stay warm. It would have make Ivan Tolstoy happy...(he having written great novels in the cold Russian winters with no heat.)
      Airplane notes: I've now been on a flight with the laptop, and verified that it is barely small enough to work on an airplane. I'm glad I avoided the notebooks with the 14" screens and wider size. Also note that it seems that some people have had their notebook screens destroyed when they have the notebook open on a plane and the person in front of them reclined their seat back...this nearly happened to me on my first flight! When the person in front of me put their seat back it was nearly impossible to work on the notebook.
      CPU notes: Intel seems to be moving backwards in their cpu designs - the smaller cache size on these newer pentiums can severly cramp their performance for the types of numerical computations done by scientists. For one application that I run (that is not at all memory intensive), the 600 MHz cpu of the Acer (256K cache) takes equally as long as my older 450 MHz Pentium III (512K cache). One moral is that scientists interested in computing things should certainly avoid the celeron cpu. We can look forward to notebooks with AMD's athlon cpu that has a sizeable cache, although I've just learned that even the newer athlons have the cache size reduced to 256K.

The Complaints Department
      It seems to me that generally blurbs such as these tend to play up how fabulous one's notebook is. First, the author has probably become familiar with workarounds to the notebook's failings and so puts them out of his/her mind. Second, with $2000+ invested in a notebook, the owner is bound to be enthusiastic about it. Here I will try to point out the problems/failings of the notebook with frank honesty (as best as I can).
      While the notebook was very quiet when I first got it 6 months ago, it has become distinctly noisier. I think this is the harddrive gradually getting worked in. See the paragraph on hdparm -S in the power saving section below. This is not a real problem, however (yet?).
      The case seems indeed to be sturdy and robust, but it does seem to scratch and marr easily. I suppose any notebook will be dinged up with use. I have already worn smooth my "F" and "J" keys; after a few years I suppose all keys will be worn smooth.
      The CDROM is a little tempermental about when/if it detects CD's when they are present. It seems that it works better when you give the CD a slight clockwise spin before you put it into the computer. This is probably a small failing of the CD drive.
      The computer comes with Windows 98 loaded in. ( :) ) And, in particular the Windows '98 CD that comes with the computer is not a real distribution of Windows '98 but an ACER thing that will put the notebook back into its original state if problems arise.
      The sound card appears to be very noisy when plugged into external speakers. Headphones work o.k. This seems to be some sort of grounding problem within the computer because touching the metal bits of the notebook affects the sound. The problem also temporarily goes away when the windows/LCD are being used. I've tried my notebook in several different environments now and this problem persists.
      The computer has a winmodem. This is less of a problem now that a winmodem driver is available, but still an annoyance to have to do something special and debugging to get the modem to work.
      ACER accessories seem very expensive. The costs of a second harddrive or additional memory from ACER are far above going rates for generic bits. For example, the harddrive is an 12GN IBM TravelStar. ACER sells its 12GB secondary disks for $359. At buy.com 20 GB 20GN TravelStar disks sell for about $160 (April 2001; you can find other places on the web that sell them for less)...the plastic bits that are screwed onto the ACER drive will merely transfer over to the second party disk. I have verified the idea; generic TravelStar disks will work! They have the exact same mechanical and electrial specifications. Similarly, ACER sells 128 MB of RAM for $174, while 128 MB of generic SODIMM (which has been verified to work) can be found for $73 or so ( 6/18/01 - now $35).
      That's all for now...I'll try to think of more things to complain about. :)

Dealing with Windows 98:
     I used FIPS to compress the Windows partition down to 2.5 GB. This presented a problem since the FIPS instructions call for making a boot floppy with the fips.exe on it and booting off of the floppy to make the repartition; of course, on the 600TER no floppy drive is available (unless you bought the floppy option). However, I copied the FIPS executables off of the RedHat CD (the entire directory dosutils/fips20 except for TRANS.TBL) into a directory in Windows, and restarted the computer in DOS mode. Defragment Windows98. In DOS mode fips.exe worked fine, except that one cannot make a backup floppy in the event one's partition table gets corrupted...don't make any mistakes! I was not concerned about mistakes, however, since on this new computer a reinstallation of Windows98 would lose nothing. FIPS worked admirably - I scrunched windows down to 2.5GB. Some laptops have a separate partition for hibernation (i.e. saving memory to disk) that one has to worry about when using FIPS - but this is not the case for the 600TER. Hibernation in Windows is to a file.      Windows comments: It is indeed annoying that ACER did not send a real copy of Windows98 with the laptop. Rather, one gets an ACER disk that will put the system back to its original factory Windows installation (Warnings abound that this will also partition the hard drive back to its original state - this would take out Linux altogether so BEWARE!!). Apparently most computers these days come this way, however - this practice is one way, perhaps, for Microsoft to cut down on piracy of the Windows operating system. I've found that the suspend will cause the system to freeze in windows. There have been some complaints that ACER overloads the computer with sundry processes running in the background, but I did not notice anything like this.

RedHat 6.2 Installation
      The RedHat installation was fairly painless. I booted off of the CDROM (which will happen by default with the RedHat CD present at boot up). As was described on the "Linux installation on a 602TER" web site, I had to do the installation in text mode (type "text" at the boot: prompt - I've read recently that you could try "linux vga=2" or "linux vga=ask" to prevent the screen going blank with a graphical installation.). I installed a KDE workstation (I have no opinion on the KDE vs Gnome debate - I have gone with KDE only by the toss of a coin). I chose the PS/2 mouse as my mouse, and the touch pad (a standard Synaptics) has worked admirably. LILO was installed as well, of course, which by default gives dual boot either to Windows or Linux (hit shift and/or tab at the "LILO:" prompt to select the system to boot into; Linux will start if you do nothing). I also installed the RedHat updates, which is a good idea for security purposes at the very least. (I downloaded the entire contents of the 6.2 updates directory, then "rpm -F *.rpm" will upgrade all installed redhat packages.)

New Harddisk Installation
      (This section added later - April 2001). I upgraded my harddrive to a 20GB IBM GN20. To do this I wanted to transfer all the stuff on the existing disk to the new disk - I did this by tarring all the data on my partitions, including the windows partitions, to other computers temporarily ("tar cf - /home | (rsh othercomputer 'cd /home/home.archive; tar xf -')" will copy over entire trees, including the "hidden" files that start with periods.). I used the ACER Windows CD to reinstall Windows to its original configuration, which was easy (and yes, using this disk to restore Windows will repartition anything you have on these disks to one gigantic windoze partition). I basically wanted to let windows do its thing first, before trying to install linux on the new disk; I am a little doubtful that a windows partition built by linux will be acceptable to windows (from experience....). RedHat 7.1 was just released, so I installed that version of RedHat on the new disk according to the procedures outlined above, except that the default gui-based installation worked fine. In this case, everything seems to work out of the box - CD writing, pcmcia, etc. so there does not seem to be a reason to upgrade any software or recompile the kernel (2.4.2 comes with 7.1). "hdparm -tT /dev/hda" tests the speed of the new drive, and it gave 17 MB/s sustained data transfer rate, a nice improvement over the 13 MB/s of the original ACER drive. The new disk is also considerably quieter than the original disk, although that will probably change with time. I did have to get and install the linmodem driver, as described below, to get the modem to work. I did try to recompile the kernel to be minimal, but I have not been able to compile the kernel modules. I then copied all of my preexisting linux data (e.g., the /home and /usr/local directories) back onto the new disk. Worked like a charm. I did have to reconfigure things like printers, my own fstab idiosyncracies, etc. I then deleted the entire contents of the windows partition (yep, "rm -rf *") and copied all the files I had archived back onto the new windows partition - my pre-existing windows booted up just fine with all its existing data and software. All this took about one day. Note that the original drive is still available, so there is not much fear of losing data; unless you damage the original disk in taking it out, moving the adaptive bits to the new drive and putting the new drive in - be careful and don't force anything!
     Comment May 15, 2001 that the IBM TravelStar harddrive has continued to work like a charm, and that RedHat 7.1 is pretty darn terrific - with unmodified 7.1 everything works fine with the Acer - USB, PCMCIA, sound, video card, CD writer etc. KDE 2 is also very nice and a nice improvement over the older version.

Kernel Upgrade
      I downloaded the latest 2.2.17 linux kernel and the IDE patch for the linux kernel. (As root cd to /usr/src, remove the linux link, unpack the new kernel there, move linux to linux-2.2.17, remake the linux link, copy the patch file to /usr/src/linux, then apply the patch by executing "patch -p1 < the.IDE.patch.filename" in /usr/src/linux, then "make xconfig" ) My motivations for installing the latest kernel are: (1) Security (2) For some reason the stock kernels that come with RedHat have poor IDE disk performance. The disk speed with the stock kernel, tested by "hdparm -tT /dev/hda" was 2-3 MB/s sustained transfer rate, while the laptop disk is UDMA(33) Ethernet and Sound Cards
     Both the ethernet transfer rate, which is a noticeable improvement in disk speed. [ADDED LATER: I am informed that one can dispense with the ide patch here and merely execute "hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/hda" to allow 32 bit transfer rates and enable dma on one's disk. See "man hdparm" and also The UDMA-HOWTO. Enabling dma is the main thing, apparently.] There seems to be some confusion about whether this notebook supports UDMA66 or not - my understanding is that the IBM TravelStar disk is indeed ATA66 capable (and this is enabled on the disk; I've checked that), but that the Intel 440BX chipset upon which the notebook is based is only ATA33 (UDMA mode2) capable. I made an inquiry to ACER; here is the response. (3) Using the CD-writer. While the rumor is that the stock installation can be made to work the CD-writer, the quick stab I took to do this did not work. In the kernel I prefer to: (a) disable the IDE/ATAPI CDROM support enable (b) SCSI emulation, (c) SCSI CDROM support, (d) SCSI generic support, and (e) do not probe all LUNS (for this I use no modules - but compile these in the kernel) to get CD-writers to work.
     I am a little uneasy about using LILO to test out a new kernel - but with no floppy drive there is no other way. I think it would be wise to burn a boot CDROM with a kernel that is known to work, in case of trouble. (Of course one can always boot off of the RedHat 6.2 CDROM in rescue mode...I've had to do this from time to time on several computers with mixed success.) I was not able to find any options to set for PCMCIA when setting up the 2.2.17 kernel.

Ethernet and Sound Cards
     Both the ethernet card (Intel EtherExpress Pro 100) and sound card (ESS solo1) work without any trouble. By default the microphone was enabled, so I began to get feed back off the mic. I suppressed the microphone input with the sound mixer. Plugging the sound output into external speakers makes for a signal that is quite noisy in both Windows and Linux; I don't know what causes this, but it might be external interference particular to my situation. I connect my notebook to my PC by connecting NIC-to-NIC with a Null Modem Cable (for cables longer than about 6', please pay attention to the twisted-pair standard or the cable won't work.).

The Crazy Winmodem
      The 600TER comes with a Lucent Technologies winmodem. This is a pain, but a solution for arbitrary kernels became available at the end of the year 2000. You can find the package (ltmodem-5.99x.tar.gz) at Lucent ltmodem.o driver. I found this to be very easy to install with the 2.4.0 kernel ("make" and then "make install"), although the "make install" only worked after I made a directory "/lib/modules/2.4.0/misc" - the modules directory structure has changed considerably for 2.4.0. If you get this latest kernel, you will also have to upgrade your module utilities package. PPP has gotten more sophisticated in kernel 2.4.0, see Documentation/Changes in the kernel tree.
See the Linmodem HOWTO site and the Linmodems web site.
      Before this driver became available, I used a 3COM 3CXM556 PCMCIA modem that I got from www.ebay.com for $26, which worked just fine, being a complete modem.
     PPP issues/problems. I've gone to the 2.4.2 kernel and found that pppd would crash with something about ioctl(PPPIOCGFLAGS) in /var/log/messages. This means, apparently, that it is time to update the pppd package (see Documentation/Changes in the kernel tree). Version 2.4.0 (of pppd not the kernel) is out and it fixes this problem. Get it from HERE . If you find that you need to load in the ppp module by hand, it is time to update your modutils package (see Documentation/Changes of the kernel tree. I enabled the ppp compression in the kernel (bsd and deflate). For ppp I have the following lines in my /etc/modules.conf file:
alias char-major-108 ppp_generic
alias /dev/ppp ppp_generic
alias tty-ldisc-3 ppp_async
alias tty-ldisc-14 ppp_synctty
# Alias ppp compression routines
alias net-pf-4 off
alias net-pf-5 off
alias ppp-compress-21 bsd_comp
alias ppp-compress-26 ppp_deflate
alias ppp-compress-24 ppp_deflate


PCMCIA support
      As mentioned above, there was no option for PCMCIA when compiling the new kernel. Since I have an updated kernel, however, the stock RedHat PCMCIA package will not work. This means that I had to get the PCMCIA source code package and compile it against my new kernel. This proved to be easy ("make config; make ; make install"). With "pcmcia" started up at boot up (which happens by default), PCMCIA started fine and my modem was found as well. This automatically linked /dev/modem to /dev/ttyS2. PPP works fine with this PCMCIA modem card - there was nothing to set up except the PPP connection (I use kppp).
      The claim is that PCMCIA uses power however, so one might not want to keep a pcmcia card always inserted in the computer when no external power is used, but put the card in in when it is needed. One can remove and install pcmcia cards whenever you want with the pcmcia package running - you get two beeps when the card is inserted and recognized, and one beep when it is removed. One can also use "tksysv" to start up and stop pcmcia when it is needed. You can also execute "pcmcia start" in /etc/rd.d/init.d (This once caused the notebook to freeze up (even ethernet did not work) but it works o.k. now (go figure...)) My modem works fine after starting up pcmcia this way, but I think I will startup pcmcia at bootup. N.B. I did have one trouble on installing the PCMCIA package/modules in that somehow a link was made from /lib/modules/2.2.17/build to /usr/src/linux. This caused depmod to go beserk; I deleted the link and then "make install" worked o.k.
      N.B. The computer can be restarted, if frozen, by holding the power switch to "on" for about 4 seconds. Restarting this way in the long run will cause all manner of problems - your disks will eventually become corrupted for sure. Fortunately this has not happened too much, i.e. only when trying to set things up.

PCMCIA - compact flash adapter
      I have a PCMCIA compactflash adapter ($8) that allows me to plug in a compactflash memory card into the notebook. I have a digital camera that takes photos onto compactflash, so this is a fast way to transfer the photos onto the computer - probably faster than USB even [I shutter to think about getting USB working in linux for my camera...]. When PCMCIA recognizes the card (indicated by two audible beeps), the compactflash card is recognized as an ide device (/dev/hde), with a dos filesystem on it (on /dev/hde1). I merely added a line for the ide device in /etc/fstab to be able to mount the compactflash filesystem and read/write stuff to it. The line in fstab is:
/dev/hde1    /flash    msdos    noauto,owner,rw,user,exec    0 0
     Memory cards such as these, by the way, may be a nice substitute for the archaic floppies - if one was at a conference and wanted to transfer a file to someone's (e.g. Windoze) computer one could transfer via the compactflash card and adapter. [Why do we still use those ridiculous floppies anyways?] The compactflash seems to work well. However, putting the compactflash card in my psion series 5MX PDA makes the msdos filesystem goes to readonly and it will then have a variety of ugly pathologies... Well, it is fun to play around with. Be sure to unmount the filesystem, but you do not have to stop pcmcia services before putting the card in, or yanking the card out.
      I tried to test the speed of the "disk" by "hdparm -tT /dev/hde" - the Timing buffer-cache reads had a speed of 113.27 MB/s, the Timing buffered disk reads (the sustained transfer rate) failed altogether - I think this whole compactflash/pcmcia business may still be in the alpha code development stage.... In any case, read and write to the compactflash card is about as fast as to the harddrive.

Memory
      I installed an additional 128 MB of 2nd party (Crucial Tech.) PC-100 memory ($124) since it is far cheaper than the proprietary ACER memory - I was pleased to see that this generic memory worked fine in the notebook. Recently, I swapped out the 64 MB RAM card with a 128 MB card (PNY - $35 it was so cheap...). I have 128+128=256MB of RAM. ACER sez that the 600 series has industry standard PC-100 sodimm (144 pin).
Memory benchmarks. I had been concerned that 2nd party memory was not as fast as ACER memory, but this concern proved unfounded. While Bar-B-Q-ing a chicken, I ran some benchmarks using a standard ocean modeling benchmark - heavy with floating point operations and using about 10 MB of RAM. The results showed that the ACER, Crucial and PNY memory cards were virtually identical, and it made no difference whether a single card was used, or the order the cards were put in the notebook - I tested 6 different combinations of the three memory cards I had. For the record the benchmark execution times were all in the range 74-76 seconds, with 1 second variations for a given configuration. To summarize: the kind of memory you get doesn't matter, nor does it matter the order you put it in the machine. It did seem that a small amount of judiciously applied chicken grease made the computer run a little faster, however.
Overall the notebook is much happier with more memory. More memory will probably be good for energy conservation as well, since the disk will not be constantly in use swapping out memory to disk. The standard 64MB of RAM is getting to be a little small - X windows/KDE uses 16 MB and xemacs, terminals, window managers, etc all use 4-6MB each (and I typically have about 12 of these things running all the time for merely low-level use...there goes 64MB of RAM)

Intel Speed Step
      I have read that Linux does not support the speed stepping of the processor when the external power is attached or unattached. Speed stepping means that without external power the cpu can run at 500 MHz, rather than 600 MHz, with a considerable power savings. I have found that booting up with no available external power puts the cpu at 500 MHz by default, while booting up with external power the speed is 600 MHz. This works for me, even though it seems that the cpu speed cannot (yet?) be changed by linux while it is booted up. See the notes/complaints on cpu cache size above.

Power Management
      I am using the kde power management tool kapm. This seems to work o.k., giving system power status and letting me put the machine into standby, suspend, and power off. The note book has keys for suspending the laptop (Fn F4) which work in Linux. Note that the kernel had to be compiled with APM support - I know very little about this, but when configuring the kernel I said yes to Enable PM, Make CPU Idle calls, Enable console blanking, and Ignore multiple suspend which seem to work o.k. However, in both Windows and Linux the computer has a tendency to freeze up with power management which I don't understand (this problem seems to have been fixed in linux - see below).
      I have recently learned that Linux is capable of going into hibernation, i.e., writing the memory to disk so that when one reboots one can merely reload the memory from disk to get back the computer's state. See Software Suspend . I am not well educated on these things, however; I have not tried to do this (it looks as if it needs kernel patches.).
      Closing the notebook will also put it into suspend mode.
      Also see the Battery Powered HOWTO for tips on configuring a laptop for optimal power usage. In particular, my laptop seems to be accessing its disk far too often, even when nothing is being done and there are tips there for how one might fix this. The Battery Powered HOWTO advises one to change the line in the /etc/inittab file to read "ud::once:/sbin/update -s 3600 -f 3600" so that the disk is sync'ed once an hour; the consensus is that this is bad advice-for a better answer see the comments on "noatime" below.
     The screen brightness can be lowered as well using Fn-left arrow; a less bright screen will use less power.
      For APM, I uncommented the line 'CHANGEVT="7"' in /etc/sysconfig/apmd. This seems to fix the problem of lockup when the computer is put into suspend mode with kapm - BUT this is not needed with XFree86 4.0.2. See: Linux on an HP Omnibook 6000 More on XFree86 under Video below.
      When KDE is installed, it sets up automounting when a CD is put in the reader. This is fine if one does not know how to mount a CD, but what happens is that the CD reader is constantly being polled to see if a CD is present. This seems to me an unnecessary use of power. This can be disabled by opening the autostart folder on the KDE desktop, and deleting (or moving elsewhere) the cdrom application there.
      I suspect that removing any PCMCIA card and removing the CDR module will serve to extend the battery life, although I have not measured this to verify the idea.
      One can execute (as root) "hdparm -S N /dev/hda" to put the harddrive into a powersaving suspend mode after 5*N seconds without disk useage. This probably saves considerable power, and the disk is actually not used all that often - things happen in memory for the most part. The notebook is also considerably quieter with the harddrive suspended. When disk access is subsequently requested, the notebook appears to power up the harddrive and function with minimal interference. I don't know what numerous suspends will do to the lifetime of the harddrive - good or bad? I have/had a problem that something kept accessing the disk, so that the disk would not stay suspended for more than about 30 seconds. I am told that something, the consensus seems to be that it is the cron daemon, is reading files from disk, and that I should add "noatime" as an option when mounting the root filesystem. The line in my /etc/fstab file looks like: /dev/hda5    /    ext2    defaults,noatime    1 1 , and this seems to have fixed the problem. According to "man mount", this option means "Do not update inode access times on this file system." The consensus (including a reply from Alan Cox!) is that there are no negative consequences to not updating the inode access times are... I will probably add the line "hdparm -S 6 /dev/hda" to my /etc/rc/rc.local file so that this is set with every bootup.
     

Video
      The ATI Mobility card is supported by XFree86. It works fine - detected and configured automatically upon installation. I chose "LCD Panel 1024x768" for the monitor upon installation. I have my color depth set to 24, since 16 does not usually have enough colors for me (things start to look peculiar). External video works as well, and one can toggle between notebook, external, and both notebook and external using the ACER special key (Fn F5) in Linux without a reboot (which was my initial concern).
      I have upgraded my X Server to XFree86 4.0.2, which seems to have improved the graphics performance by 10% or so and fixed some problems with dpms. To do this upgrade either wait for the RedHat 7.1 release (expected before/during March 2001), or go to the XFree86 web site and download their recommended packages. Install with the install script "Xinstall.sh", after backing up your present XFree86 directories. The configuration file proved to be a little tricky, e.g. one does not give vertical or horizontal frequency ranges in the Monitor section, and the mode line for the screen is "Modes "Native panel mode"". Here is my XF86Config file - based on RedHat 7.1. Also, if you uncommented the line 'CHANGEVT="7"' in /etc/sysconfig/apmd, you should recomment it. I've also had to add the line " Option "NoPM" " to the "Section "ServerFlags""; without it, the computer suspends o.k. and recovers o.k., but X windows seems to get restarted so that I have to log in again (and lose whatever X windows I had open). N.B. The DGA extension is not yet supported; I don't really know what that is, except that I needed it for vmware.

CD Writer
      As mentioned above the kernel was recompiled for scsi emulation and scsi generic support. I used xcdroast, which when installed via the rpm makes the appropriate scsi devices. The CD Writer is recognized as /dev/sr0, so that /dev/cdrom should be relinked to this device. This relink should take care of any /etc/fstab issues as well. I have now officially burned a CD with xcdroast, and there were no problems. I would hesitate to pull out the CD Writer module from linux without a shutdown. (One can remove this while Windows is booted up.) I anticipate leaving this module behind while traveling, to save my shoulders the weight.

Printers
      The notebook does not have a parallel port on the back of it for a printer to be directly connected to it, but the notebook comes with a small external connector that plugs into the expansion port that gives the notebook a parallel port and a serial port. The EASYPORT docking station also has a parallel port. I had no trouble getting a Canon BJC-250 printer to work with this connector and its parallel port. One does not have to reboot to get linux to see a printer on a parallel port - merely plug it in with linux booted up will work fine. Things seem to be going the way of USB these days, and presumably a USB printer could be plugged directly into one of the USB ports of the notebook.

IRDA - infrared connections
      I have messed around a little with the IRDA. This requires some kernel reconfiguration, and for irda to be set up from /etc/rd.d/init.d/irda and /etc/irda/drivers. I'm not quite sure what I have done, but so far I get junk via IRDA from my Psion Series 5 palmtop over the device /dev/ttyS1 (via minicom and also "cat /dev/ttyS1"). I can't talk back to the psion, nor can I transfer files yet. I think this means that IRDA works o.k., I just don't have the proper software send a reply back to the Psion.

Summary
      Overall I am quite pleased with the notebook. I think this notebook is a nice compromise between functionality and portability. I have been pleasantly surprised at how well things set up. I fussed with the initial installation on and off for about 4 days.

This web site developed using the quanta package (with help from gvim...).