Description

General

CPU	Mem	HD	Screen	Video	Lectors	Price	Autonomy/weigth	Sound	Network
PIII850	128Mo	20 Go	14,1TFT	S3 Savage MX/MV	DVD 8X floppy	About $2000	2-4 h 2.9 kg	ESS Allegro 1988-1	Ethernet: Realtek 8139 Modem : ESS winmodem

CPU

Mem

Screen

Video

Lectors

Price

Autonomy/weigth

Sound

Network

PIII850

128Mo

20 Go

14,1TFT

S3 Savage MX/MV

DVD 8X

floppy

About $2000

2-4 h

2.9 kg

ESS Allegro 1988-1

Ethernet:

Realtek 8139

Modem : ESS winmodem

Connectors

2 PCMCIA port
1 PS2 ( you can use a double ps2 plug to use keyboard & mouse at the same time )
1 Infra Red port
1 TV out ( S-video )
Audio: 1 out, 1 in, 1 jack
2 USB
1 RJ45 for ethernet and modem
1 serial port ( little one)
1parallel port
1 kensington hole
1 VGA out
2 built-in loudspeakers
1 microphone

Note: I didn't get any portbar connector in spite of the advert description.

dmesg

screenshot 1

General feelings

Excellent product to be used under linux at work and at office. Mine was sold with Microsoft Windows Millenium. After having resized partition ( with partition magics ), I installed Suse 7.2 and everything was OK.

Update : I had to change the mother card ( 300€, by Asus France support ) after 2 years of good services. It didn't boot any more.

Summary for Suse 7.2 and Mandrake 8 ( kernel 2.4.4/ XFree 4.0.3/KDE 2.1.1 ) :

Video	yes
Sound	yes
DVD	CD-ROM reading: yes Data DVD reading: yes Video DVD reading: yes (see ogle : http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/downloads.html )
Mouse	yes ( see XF86config )
IR	? (must work )
APM	yes , I use KDE module to check battery level
Ethernet	yes
Modem	no ( winmodem ) Check http://www.linmodems.org but don't expect it to work before a long time.

To sum up, everything was perfect except the modem. I will use one old one on serial port or I will buy a cheap one for PCMCIA.
Every hardware part have been detected without any additional configuration ( but mouse under Suse ) and I got a running and usable system in less than half an hour. I advise you to avoid Mandrake 8.0 with this lapstop because I had some BIOS clocks problems with this distribution.

Useful information

Star Office 5.2 can freeze your notebook. If you use it, put that line in your profile:

export SAL_DO_NOT_USE_INVERT50=true

Change BIOS settings: OS= others. Note that suspend to RAM works perfectly.

To avoid big and ugly fonts under text console, put vga=791 in your /etc/lilo.conf and type 'lilo' under root:

   image=/boot/vmlinuz
   label=linux
   vga=791
   root=/dev/hda6
   append=" quiet"
   read-only

To add some RAM : you have one slot bellow the keyboard. I tried to add a 256 Mo memory to reach 384 Mo but in this case, system detects only 256Mo, so put only a 128Mo memory.

Update: A L8400K owner reports that he uses a Kingston RAM and that it works perfectly. (now 384Mb ).

X11 config

Using Suse 7.2, I had a bad X11 configuration with sax: the touchpad didn't work at install ( random jumps ). The mouse for the touchpad must be PS/2 to solve problem. Now, I use my lapstop with the touchpad and a USB cordless/optical/wheel logiteck mouse, both running perfectly.

Here's my XF86Config.

Kernel compilation

I recompiled the 2.4.4 kernel without problem.

Here's my compilation config.