1. AMD Turion Laptop
Within two days, the pre-installed Windows got wiped off the HD .

Specs:
- AMD Turion MT-32 (1.8 Ghz, 512 kB L2 cache)
- 1024 MB RAM DDR 333
- 100 GB HD (Seagate 5400 rpm)
- 15.4" TFT WXGA (1280x800)
- ATi Radeon XP200 chipset (built-in X300 GPU)
- Broadcom 4318 802.11b/g wireless LAN
- RealTek Rt8139 10/100 Mb LAN
- Intel Azalia HD audio-compliant chip
- DVD-RW DL 8x

Everything I need works... Except for the wireless chip. No luck with other (patched) kernels, etc., etc. The onboard sound is a bit crappy.

2. Heavy rig / Gaming monster
- AMD Athlon Xp 3200+
- 2 GB DDR 400 RAM (2-3-3-6)
- 2x 80 GB S-ATA Maxtor HD
- 19" Sony TFT monitor
- ATi Radeon 9700 with a 9700 Pro bios (and speeds)
- Yukon Marvell Gigabit LAN
- nForce2 10/100 LAN
- RaLink RT2500 802.11b/g wireless LAN (MSI PC54G2 PCI-card)
- nForce2 AC97 audio
- NEC 3520 DVD+-RW DL

This is a dualboot box (with Windows of course, for gaming). Everything works on this one; I even managed to get the wireless up and running (with the native Linux driver) with WPA-PSK AES encryption. It is smooth, believe me .

3. Mediaserver
- AMD Athlon Xp 2200+ (clocked down; FSB 400, 1.5 Ghz CPU speed)
- 1 GB DDR 400 RAM
- 40 GB Maxtor HD
- 200 GB Maxtor HD
- nVidia GeForce4 MX4000
- nForce2 10/100 LAN
- RaLink RT2500 802.11b/g wireless LAN (MSI PC54G2 PCI-card)
- nForce2 AC97 audio

For this one, everything works also. This box is connected to my amplifier, and I log in via SSH to maintain it. It stores my music collection, and some backups too. I browse my music collection by using X over SSH . It's really fancy; I just log on from my laptop, and amaroK appears on my laptop, running on my server, and playing the music that's there . And the sound? Well, that comes out of my stereo boxes .

I wanted to add something about my fancy laptop . Thanks to the cpufrequtils program, my Turion obeys me as he should - clocking down (800 Mhz) by default, and up (1600-1800 Mhz) when needed. However, setting the CPU governor to 'ondemand' (which is needed to have my Turion behave that way), didn't work at boot. I think I found out why - because I issued that command to soon, and apparently the needed /proc files aren't created then. So I told it to wait a few seconds more, and behold...



This is really nice . I heard today that it's not common at all to have on-the-fly clock frequency adjustment working on Linux laptops, so I'm really proud of this - especially since I'm a first timer .

Borromini,

Could you share how you got cpufreq working on your laptop? Step-by-step would be nice, since I am new to this.
I have a laptop with AMD Athlon 1500+ and I think Zenwalk would be a good choice for it.

Thanks in advance.

Install this:
http://users.telenet.be/saranno.famosi/ ... 6-1Z24.tgz
http://users.telenet.be/saranno.famosi/ ... 6-1Z24.md5

Doesn't that mean you paid for windows... and just threw it away

Next time get a laptop without windows in the first place, it's cheaper 

A laptop without XP is kind of hard to find in Belgium... The Fujitsu-Siemens ones come with XP Home pre-installed. So it's not like I had a choice. And the IBM's were a bit too expensive.


Trust me, if I could have had it without Windows, I would. The licence you get is only valid for that box anyway, you can't use it on other boxes...

@Borromini
Just out of curiosity: Why do you use cpufreq-utils instead of cpufreqd (which is availabe via netpk)?

Btw, I'm from Germany and there are some XP-less laptops available. But they are mostly the very, very cheap ones with bad displays, loud fans and/or small batteries.

Serval, I used cpufrequtils because I stumbled upon it when googling... and because I didn't knew cpufreqd was there . It works just fine for me, so I see no reason to change.

P.S. You can post my howto in the tips & tricks section, I'll just modify it if necessary, put my credits in it etc. Thanks for asking (and finding it back ).

having a laptop in one room and a PC in another (both on Zenwalk 2.2) I wonder what I need to do in order to start an X session from my laptop... Could you describe it in a few words?

You'll need X running on both boxes; in the server box, open /etc/ssh/sshd_conf and modify & uncomment the ForwardX line, on the client, do the same in /etc/ssh/ssh_conf.

thx it's running but too slow for X sessions  - seems that my laptop (PII 400MHz) needs more power....

Ok . Thanks to a noble soul who wrote a driver for the wlan button of my A1655G, I am surfing the wireless web with my laptop right now . Wpa_supplicant was a b*tch, but I slayed her in the end . And I still got my WPA AES encryption  .

**cough*cough** write a tips and tricks tutorial...