[lug] hp laptops

[P. Scott DeVos]

Alex Olivas wrote:
> i'm thinking about getting a hp laptop soon and was wondering if anyone 
> knew of any problems
> loading linux onto it.  a friend of mine told me a while ago it was a 
> nightmare on their desktops.
> something about needing hp drivers for everything and of course they had 
> none for linux.

I was able to install KRUD 9.0 on an HP Pavilion.  It worked fine except 
the Pavilion only understands ACPI and not APM so I had to recompile a 
kernel to get battery indicators and the such.  No driver problems 
what-so-ever.

> aside from this does anyone know about the general quality of hp 
> pavilions?

The one I used was a low end Pavilion purchased about 6 months ago.  To 
save money they removed some standard items--no serial port and no PS/2 
port--only usb. To get around these problems, I also purchased the 
following:

iogear GUC10KM USB/dual PS/2 adapter
Belkin F5U109 USB/Serial adapter

Which both worked great with a stock KRUD kernel.

Quality-wise:  The left pad button no longer works, but I use pad taps 
instead and that works great.  Under linux I never had this problem, but 
  my customer asked me to put Windows back onto the machine and now I 
periodically get a problem on boot saying that it can't find a file. 
Ctl-Alt-Del usually fixes the problem.  The whole thing just feels 
cheap!  But, of course, it was!

   i've had a hard time
> finding any product reviews.
> thanks,
> alex.
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-- 
P. Scott DeVos
President,
Saving Tree Services, Inc.
dba Countryside Technology Center