I just finished (sort of) an install on a friends Compaq Presario 905US. He had tried multiple times, with multiple distros to get Linux on this machine, and I made the mistake of saying that I'd never found a computer that Mandrake wouldn't install on. I still haven't, but this one was a total beast. To begin with, the install crashed on hardware detection until I used the "no pci" switch. Then it locked up at the acceptance screen until I added the "noauto" switch. After that install was normal, except for a notice about "untested Northbridge", until Mandrake failed to detect the Ati Radeon vid card, which surprised me, because my laptop has one and it was configured automagically. After manually configing that, the sound card couldn't be found or configured. On first boot, I had sound, so what was up with that??? Trident AC97 sound, btw. Then I got random crashes until I appended "ide=nodma" in lilo. No usb modules are loading (probably because of all the "no" options on install, and I haven't looked into that. Maybe I'll need to recompile, but hopefully an insmod will do the trick. I'll need to check the bios to see that he has the legacy option turned on for that, too. He wanted the pos back for the weekend--hopefully the Realtek 6139 (I think) won't give him any problems when he configures his DSL connection.
Anyone else have one of these and have any tips for me? e.
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