The main advantage of a pre-loaded OS...

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>

| years, so I'm not afraid to tweak kernel options.  I finally got an Acer
| Aspire 4551 notebook fully functional in 64-bit Gentoo, but the process
| was "an epic saga".  Once you know what has to be done it's dead easy.
| Finding out what has to be done is the problem.

Yes.  Some notebooks are way harder than others.  Some devices are way
harder than others.  Some distros do better than others for particular
hardware.

Over the many years that I've used Linux, installations have gotten a
lot friendlier.  One side-effect is that when something goes wrong it
is actually harder to deal with.  On the other hand, a lot of cases
just work.

Notebooks are tough.  They have a lot of oddball integrated
peripherals.  Some aren't worth figuring out (eg. my ThinkPad has a
fingerprint reader that can be supported but I don't care enough to
figure that out).

Ubuntu claims (claimed?) to have put a lot of work into making their 
distro work on all the notebooks they could get their hands on.

I used to use http://www.linux-laptop.net/ to share hints about
particular notebooks.  Bad feature: they expect you to host the
content and that doesn't work well.  Ubuntu has an equivalent, I
think.

Please record you findings somewhere that people will discover via
Google.

My impression is that Gentoo is a DIY distro so things might be more
work but you might be able to solve more problems.  That opinion is
not worth much because I've never tried Gentoo.

| 1) Getting USB mice and keyboards and other low-speed USB devices to
| work requires the USB OHCI driver be installed alongside the USB EHCI
| driver.  Tthe "Root Hub Transaction Translators" item is *SUPPOSED* to
| provide OHCI support via the EHCI driver.  But for this machine, it
| doesn't work.

I don't remember anything like this problem with the distros I've used.

| 2) An additional entry in the kernel is required to get the Broadcom
| Tigon 3 gigabit ethernet working.

I don't know what an "entry" is.  Enabling another switch in the
kernel config file?

| 3) Power management (remember, this is a notebook) is a wiki article in
| itself.

These days I've not had much trouble.  But I agree that "sleep" and
"hybernate" can be intractable.  The BIOS ACPI tables are often buggy.

| 4) Setting up the ATI/Radeon video card to enable full hardware
| acceleration requires downloading a firmware blob and entering the
| directory into the kernel config.

I don't know what you mean by "firmware blog".  To fully use the
hardware I think that you need the ATI proprietary driver (which may
or may not involve a firmware blob, but that is its business).

| 5) The webcam doesn't show up under "lspci".  It's connected internally
| via USB, and shows up under "lsusb".

Not surprising to me.

| 7) The basic command for recording sound in ALSA mode is...
| 
| ffmpeg -y -f alsa -i plughw:0,0 audio1.wav
| 
| How many of you have ever heard of "plughw:0,0"?  The OSS mode version
| 
| ffmpeg -y -f oss  -i /dev/dsp audio2.wav
| 
| is more readable.

Surely ffmpeg is not a basic command.  There must be something more
basic.  ffmpeg's flags are not simple either.

I generally let Pulseaudio handle sound these days.  Many people
detest it.

I admit that I spent an hour or two last night struggling with MythTV 
front-end problems that turned out to be related to sound.  The symptoms 
were pretty odd (including the front-end hanging with a black screen).  
So sound is NOT as simple and straightforward as one would expect.  For 
the record: the frontend was using the audio output device setting 
"ALSA:default" and it needed to use "ALSA:pulse".
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