	Eric's Home Page
Menu: Home UP EDITORIALS Another Linux Laptop More Scumbags Join the EFF Java woes Linux Laptop Die, threads! Welfare Whores I bought it, it's mine. MS Trial Verdict Linux Desktop Letter to Bob Robb MS Myths 1-3 Windows? No, KDE! Benchmarketing 101 Benchmarks Galore! Mindcraft Reality Check Open Source Economics FUD 101 Commoditization Markets & Microsoft Don't Cry for Bill Links Contact Info My Resume My Public Key EMAIL Eric BadTux Portal[et]	HP Pavilion ze5185 and Linux This is a record of my experiences setting up Mandrake 9.0 Linux on the HP Pavilion ze5185. For info on setting up Red Hat 8.0, see Pawel S. Veselov's page on setting up Linux on the HP Pavilion ze5155, a laptop which is identical to the ze5185 except for less memory, smaller hard drive, and slower processor. The HP Pavilion ze5185 is one of HP's "home/office" laptops. It comes with Microsoft Windows XP. The hardware consists of: 2.4ghz Pentium 4 processor 512MB RAM 60gb hard drive DVD/CD-RW drive Not one, not two, but THREE fans, and a mighty cooling system that appears to include a radiator of some sort (yep, you can warm your lunch on the left side of the laptop where the radiator is located :-) Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] M1671 Northbridge [Aladdin-P4] Two PCMCIA/Cardbus sockets 1400x1025 15 inch LCD display (very sharp) ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY with 32MB dedicated video memory 3 USB ports (OHCI) Firewire port (Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 IEEE-1394 Controller (PHY/Link) 1394a-2000) National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller ALI/Trident sound ALI/Conexant WinModem NO APM BIOS (only ACPI). All of the hardware is supported by Linux, though there is some missing functionality in some places. I will discuss that where needed. Installation The first thing I needed to do was create some partitions for Linux. For a laptop workstation machine, two data partitions and a swap partition for Linux has proven to be best for me -- I put all my files on /usr/local (/home/eric is just a link to /usr/local/eric), and thus if I need to blow away the OS and re-install, I can do so with little muss or fuss. I've experimented with more granular partition setups in the past, but none of them gained me anything for a Linux laptop workstation. I always format my / partition with EXT3 since that is what most Linux distributions like / to be, and I always format /usr/local with ReiserFS since it is in my opinion the best filesystem for Linux. I decided to devote 20gb to Windows XP and 40gb to Linux. Because XP uses NTFS rather than FAT32, I decided to invest in some partitioning software. Rather than hoary old Partition Magic, I bought something called "Acronis Partition Expert" which claimed to know about ReiserFS as well as EXT3. It worked quite well, resizing the NTFS partition down then allowing me to set up a primary partition for my Linux 'root' and a secondary partition with my Linux '/usr/local' and 'swap' partitions. I set up a 1gb swap partition (since the laptop is expandable to 1gb RAM and it's good to have a swap as big as your RAM), an 8gb EXT3 / partition (gotta have room to install all that Mandrake 9.0 goodness!), and devoted the rest of the Linux space to my ReiserFS /usr/local partition. Acronis Partition Expert did the job, and did it for less money than Partition Magic. I can definitely recommend it, at least for this limited use (I don't recommend attempting to use its advertised ability to resize Linux partitions though, given how fast Linux filesystems change!). Once I had partitions, I could install Mandrake 9.0 on it. Choose the EXPERT install, because that will allow you to use the partitions that you created with Partition Expert. I recommend allowing Mandrake to re-format the partitions during the install, even though I had Partition Expert format the partitions when I created them, because Linux is a moving target and even a 2003 release of a 3rd party program may be aiming at a few versions back. Mandrake recognized the video and sound hardware and installed correctly. Do set up the XFree86 resolution to 1400x1025, otherwise you may get a "pictureframe" effect. Also, 16bpp is much faster than 24bpp (which is somewhat sluggish under XFree86 at that resolution). I did not experience any of the reported problems with Linux installers not seeing the keyboard or touchpad, but I did follow the advice to type a few keys during installer boot under the theory that this would allow the installer to "see" the keyboard. Since I only installed once, I don't know whether this was necessary or not. The next issue was getting ACPI to work so that the KDE battery monitor would work and so that it would properly turn off. The first part is the userland daemon. 'urpmi acpid' handled that. The next part was kernel-land. The 2.4.19 kernel that comes with Mandrake 9.0 turns off ACPI by default. Getting ACPI in the kernel to work proved to be a major hassle. I attempted to use a generic 2.4.20 kernel with the latest ACPI patches but it turns out that Mandrake's kernel is heavily hacked, and Mandrake Linux really doesn't run well on a generic kernel. I tried the Mandrake-patched 2.4.21 pre-release from the Mandrake 'Cooker' distribution but it had some issues. I eventually came across a 2.4.20 from an earlier version of 'Cooker' (note: the above is at my house on the wrong side of a 512kb DSL line, so unless you're using Mandrake 9.0, don't download it). This already has the latest ACPI patch applied to it, so you don't need to try to patch it again. The problem I encountered next was that if I modprobed the acpi modules, my new kernel appeared to interfere with initialization of the ATI chip (I'd get garbage upon typing 'startx'), or did an "Ooops" when I tried to shut down. I eventually tracked this down to the kernel setting "Enable Local APIC support on uniprocessors" under "Processor type and features". This must be turned OFF, because it appears to conflict with ACPI. So you can't use the standard Mandrake kernel, you must compile your own from their kernel-source rpm (thus why I only have their kernel-source RPM on my FTP site). Once all that was accomplished, and my kernel re-compiled, I could modprobe the ac and battery modules and get my power display under KDE, and the system turned off when I shut it down. I don't recall having to download anything to make the power monitor work right, Mandrake apparently already has it ACPI-compliant (or at least compliant with the version of ACPI in their patched kernel -- as you'd expect). Add lines 'ac' and 'battery' to /etc/modules to have them auto-loaded upon boot. USB It Just Works. I tried syncing my Handspring Visor on all three ports, it worked on all of them. The secret to syncing the Visor, BTW, has nothing to do with running on a laptop. Whether on laptop or desktop, I had to set up a dummy directory /devs then 'ln -s /dev/usb/tts/0 /devs/pilot1' and 'ln -s /dev/usb/tts/1 /devs/pilot2'. I use 'jpilot' and have it set to point to /devs/pilot2 as the Palm Pilot device. You hit the hot sync button on the Visor, wait a second for the USB system to map the device into /dev/usb, then hit the sync button on 'jpilot'. Otherwise you get the infamous 'device not plugged in or available' message. Adding a wireless card For some reason Mandrake did not install the PCMCIA software. So the first thing to do is type 'urpmi pcmcia-cs' to install the PCMCIA software, and then edit /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia to enable the PMCIA system. My /etc/pcmcia reads: PCMCIA=yes PCIC=yenta_socket PCIC_OPTS=do_scan=0 CORE_OPTS= CARDMGR_OPTS=-f You can now type '/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia' and it'll detect your card (if it's a supported card -- I have a generic Prism II card from Addtron that works fine under Linux, doesn't work at all under Windows XP, who woulda thunk it?!). The next thing you need to do is install the wireless tools. 'urpmi wireless-tools' will handle that task. Once you have the wireless tools installed, you're ready to configure your card. On the KDE control panel, click the "Mandrake Control Center" icon (the picture of a monitor with a tool superimposed on it). Click "Hardware" in the left column, then the "Hardware List" icon when that comes up. Expand the 'Ethernetcard' list item and you should see your wireless card listed there. Click on it, and you'll get another column with information about it. For a generic Prism II card you won't need to set any module parameters, just click 'Run Config Tool', and click through the interfaces until you get to the wireless card. You'll then get a big box full of stuff to set up. I'm not sure what's what on here, other than the ESSID (set up according to what's on your wireless router or 'any' if you roam) and 'Wireless Mode' (set to 'Managed'). I have not yet set up the WEP stuff, but will attempt to do so shortly. Stuff I haven't tried yet I haven't tried the Firewire port yet. Pawel got the modem running (he thinks), I haven't tried yet. Check back later. This uses the Conexant modem drivers for Linux, but with the pre-built drivers you must use 'lspci' to first grok out the PCI device ID since it is not a standard Conexant device ID. I downloaded the driver as a source gzip and followed the instructions to build an RPM with it (rpm -ta sf.tar.gz) and then installed the RPM that got built. When I did hsconfig and asked it to automatically detect my modem, it properly did so. Apparently the issue that Pawel ran into (where it did not properly detect the ALI version of the Conexant modem) has been fixed, at least in the tarball. But I haven't tried actually dialing anybody with it (I did connect to the modem "port" and typed a few AT commands to verify that at least I could do that much). Playing DVD's I played a DVD that I bought and own on my "illegal circumvention device" (my Linux laptop). Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that makes me a criminal. I got the software from the Penguin Liberation Front. Once I added it into my software sources list as directed on that site, I selected 'mplayer' as my movie player (I also tried Xine, but could not get it to work). I had to do 'ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd', and then it immediately recognized my DVD. Playback is a bit jerkier than under Windows (since it's being done entirely by software with no hardware speedups like on the Windows side), but is acceptable for watching a movie in a window while doing other things on the computer. One thing that you will* note is that, since it's working the CPU hard plus using a lot of juice to turn the DVD spindle, the laptop's cooling fans (all three of them!) will switch into high speed mode (which sounds vaguely like a room-sized fan) and then, after a while, switch into turbo-speed mode (which sounds kinda like a vacuum cleaner at full blast!). I haven't switched back to Windows yet to see if that happens when playing a DVD under Windows, but I suspect not, since the Windows driver makes use of hardware to decode the DVD. Burning CD/RWs It Just Works(tm). I use xcdroast as my CD burner of choice, and it auto-detected and everything. No problems there. Performance This thing is faster'n'snot. I mean it. Software compiles like the blazes, and you never have to wait. UNLESS you forget to turn on the DMA and IRQ flags on the hard drive controllers. Make sure you have the 'hdparm' command installed ('urpmi hdparm' at a root prompt will make sure of that), then add to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local the following lines: hdparm -d1 -u1 /dev/hda hdparm -d1 -u1 /dev/hdb Your disk drives will thank you (and you will definitely notice the performance increase when the drives start up!). Stuff that doesn't work right Okay, since you may have gotten the impression that all is peaches and cream, here's what doesn't work right: Suspend/Resume: Nope, won't do it. Scroll "bar" on the touchpad -- useless. 'Disable touchpad' button -- doesn't do a thing. The only way to disable the touchpad is to plug in an external PS/2 mouse, which then disables it (something I dislike, on my old Compaq I could have both the mouse and the touchpad working at the same time). One of these days I'd like to see if I can reprogram it to work as a middle mouse button (ChordMiddle sucks). Volume controls on side -- nope, they don't do a thing (unlike on my old Compaq). You have to pull up the volume control in KDE to turn down the volume (including that annoying loud 'beep' that is the system bell!). You can't switch back and forth between console mode and GUI mode using ALT-F1, you'll lock up "X" when you go back into GUI mode. To be fair, this also happened with my old Compaq, and appears to be a generic issue with many recent chipsets under XFree86. Stuff I don't like The CD bay is on the right side, right where it slams into a mouse if you want to put a CD or DVD into it. This thing has not one, not two, but THREE fans, and apparently three basic fan speed/configurations -- mild, high, and wild. If you do a lengthy kernel compile or watch a DVD, you get to hear the 'wild' speed, which is akin to a vacuum cleaner's roar as all three fans kick in at their highest speed. While these fans do a great job of keeping things cool, they suck their air from under the laptop, meaning you can't really put this laptop on your lap unless you're careful not to block the fan intakes. Battery life sucks. My old Compaq would often go 3 hours on a full charge. This guy is lucky to go two hours, and that's only if you aren't doing something CPU-intensive, in which case you're lucky to get an hour and a half. Buy an extra battery and carry it with you if you are going to make a long airline trip with no place to plug in a laptop. It has no little "legs" for lifting the tail of the laptop to lean the keyboard towards me, and the laptop itself is quite "chunky", making it a bit of a pain in the wrist. The hinges for the LCD lid look a bit flimsy. One thing you had to say about my old Compaq, those hinges were CHUNKY. Two years of hard (and I mean HARD) use, and while the laptop case looked a bit battered, the hinges had not a creak nor a crack. General conclusions This thing is fast, has a huge hard drive, and tons of RAM (up to 1GB of RAM). All the major hardware works (aside from insignificant things like the touchpad disable button and the volume control keys), the display is sharp, it has a decent feature set, and the little nuisances you have to put up with (like the short battery life) are generally livable and no worse than the nuisances you have to put up with on other laptops (all of which, nowdays, seem to use special-purpose hardware that takes a lot of work to get Linux to work with). All in all, for the price ($1599!), this thing works quite well under Linux. I really wanted a laptop with USB2 and maybe a DVD-RW drive, but a) Linux doesn't support USB2 well yet, b) Fry's Electronics put this one on sale for $1599, and c) when I checked on Google, I found that many people had already gotten this laptop working with Linux, while the Sony and Fujitsu models that had all the features didn't seem to work well with Linux, so ...

Eric's Home Page

HP Pavilion ze5185 and Linux

This is a record of my experiences setting up Mandrake 9.0 Linux on the HP Pavilion ze5185. For info on setting up Red Hat 8.0, see Pawel S. Veselov's page on setting up Linux on the HP Pavilion ze5155, a laptop which is identical to the ze5185 except for less memory, smaller hard drive, and slower processor.

The HP Pavilion ze5185 is one of HP's "home/office" laptops. It comes with Microsoft Windows XP. The hardware consists of:

2.4ghz Pentium 4 processor
512MB RAM
60gb hard drive
DVD/CD-RW drive
Not one, not two, but *THREE* fans, and a mighty cooling system that appears to include a radiator of some sort (yep, you can warm your lunch on the left side of the laptop where the radiator is located :-)
Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] M1671 Northbridge [Aladdin-P4]
Two PCMCIA/Cardbus sockets
1400x1025 15 inch LCD display (very sharp)
ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY with 32MB dedicated video memory
3 USB ports (OHCI)
Firewire port (Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 IEEE-1394 Controller (PHY/Link) 1394a-2000)
National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
ALI/Trident sound
ALI/Conexant WinModem
*NO* APM BIOS (only ACPI).

All of the hardware is supported by Linux, though there is some missing functionality in some places. I will discuss that where needed.

Installation

The first thing I needed to do was create some partitions for Linux. For a laptop workstation machine, two data partitions and a swap partition for Linux has proven to be best for me -- I put all my files on /usr/local (/home/eric is just a link to /usr/local/eric), and thus if I need to blow away the OS and re-install, I can do so with little muss or fuss. I've experimented with more granular partition setups in the past, but none of them gained me anything for a Linux laptop workstation. I always format my / partition with EXT3 since that is what most Linux distributions like / to be, and I always format /usr/local with ReiserFS since it is in my opinion the best filesystem for Linux.

I decided to devote 20gb to Windows XP and 40gb to Linux. Because XP uses NTFS rather than FAT32, I decided to invest in some partitioning software. Rather than hoary old Partition Magic, I bought something called "Acronis Partition Expert" which claimed to know about ReiserFS as well as EXT3. It worked quite well, resizing the NTFS partition down then allowing me to set up a primary partition for my Linux 'root' and a secondary partition with my Linux '/usr/local' and 'swap' partitions. I set up a 1gb swap partition (since the laptop is expandable to 1gb RAM and it's good to have a swap as big as your RAM), an 8gb EXT3 / partition (gotta have room to install all that Mandrake 9.0 goodness!), and devoted the rest of the Linux space to my ReiserFS /usr/local partition. Acronis Partition Expert did the job, and did it for less money than Partition Magic. I can definitely recommend it, at least for this limited use (I don't recommend attempting to use its advertised ability to resize Linux partitions though, given how fast Linux filesystems change!).

Once I had partitions, I could install Mandrake 9.0 on it. Choose the *EXPERT* install, because that will allow you to use the partitions that you created with Partition Expert. I recommend allowing Mandrake to re-format the partitions during the install, even though I had Partition Expert format the partitions when I created them, because Linux is a moving target and even a 2003 release of a 3rd party program may be aiming at a few versions back.

Mandrake recognized the video and sound hardware and installed correctly. Do set up the XFree86 resolution to 1400x1025, otherwise you may get a "pictureframe" effect. Also, 16bpp is much faster than 24bpp (which is somewhat sluggish under XFree86 at that resolution). I did not experience any of the reported problems with Linux installers not seeing the keyboard or touchpad, but I did follow the advice to type a few keys during installer boot under the theory that this would allow the installer to "see" the keyboard. Since I only installed *once*, I don't know whether this was necessary or not.

The next issue was getting ACPI to work so that the KDE battery monitor would work and so that it would properly turn off. The first part is the userland daemon. 'urpmi acpid' handled that. The next part was kernel-land. The 2.4.19 kernel that comes with Mandrake 9.0 turns off ACPI by default. Getting ACPI in the kernel to work proved to be a major hassle. I attempted to use a generic 2.4.20 kernel with the latest ACPI patches but it turns out that Mandrake's kernel is *heavily* hacked, and Mandrake Linux really doesn't run well on a generic kernel. I tried the Mandrake-patched 2.4.21 pre-release from the Mandrake 'Cooker' distribution but it had some issues. I eventually came across a 2.4.20 from an earlier version of 'Cooker' (note: the above is at my house on the wrong side of a 512kb DSL line, so unless you're using Mandrake 9.0, don't download it). This already has the latest ACPI patch applied to it, so you don't need to try to patch it again.

The problem I encountered next was that if I modprobed the acpi modules, my new kernel appeared to interfere with initialization of the ATI chip (I'd get garbage upon typing 'startx'), or did an "Ooops" when I tried to shut down. I eventually tracked this down to the kernel setting "Enable Local APIC support on uniprocessors" under "Processor type and features". This must be turned *OFF*, because it appears to conflict with ACPI. So you can't use the standard Mandrake kernel, you must compile your own from their kernel-source rpm (thus why I only have their kernel-source RPM on my FTP site).

Once all that was accomplished, and my kernel re-compiled, I could modprobe the ac and battery modules and get my power display under KDE, and the system turned off when I shut it down. I don't recall having to download anything to make the power monitor work right, Mandrake apparently already has it ACPI-compliant (or at least compliant with the version of ACPI in their patched kernel -- as you'd expect). Add lines 'ac' and 'battery' to /etc/modules to have them auto-loaded upon boot.

USB

It Just Works. I tried syncing my Handspring Visor on all three ports, it worked on all of them.

The secret to syncing the Visor, BTW, has nothing to do with running on a laptop. Whether on laptop or desktop, I had to set up a dummy directory /devs then 'ln -s /dev/usb/tts/0 /devs/pilot1' and 'ln -s /dev/usb/tts/1 /devs/pilot2'. I use 'jpilot' and have it set to point to /devs/pilot2 as the Palm Pilot device. You hit the hot sync button on the Visor, wait a second for the USB system to map the device into /dev/usb, then hit the sync button on 'jpilot'. Otherwise you get the infamous 'device not plugged in or available' message.

Adding a wireless card

For some reason Mandrake did not install the PCMCIA software. So the first thing to do is type 'urpmi pcmcia-cs' to install the PCMCIA software, and then edit /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia to enable the PMCIA system. My /etc/pcmcia reads:

PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=yenta_socket
PCIC_OPTS=do_scan=0
CORE_OPTS=
CARDMGR_OPTS=-f

You can now type '/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia' and it'll detect your card (if it's a supported card -- I have a generic Prism II card from Addtron that works fine under Linux, doesn't work at all under Windows XP, who woulda thunk it?!).

The next thing you need to do is install the wireless tools. 'urpmi wireless-tools' will handle that task.

Once you have the wireless tools installed, you're ready to configure your card. On the KDE control panel, click the "Mandrake Control Center" icon (the picture of a monitor with a tool superimposed on it). Click "Hardware" in the left column, then the "Hardware List" icon when that comes up. Expand the 'Ethernetcard' list item and you should see your wireless card listed there. Click on it, and you'll get another column with information about it. For a generic Prism II card you won't need to set any module parameters, just click 'Run Config Tool', and click through the interfaces until you get to the wireless card. You'll then get a big box full of stuff to set up. I'm not sure what's what on here, other than the ESSID (set up according to what's on your wireless router or 'any' if you roam) and 'Wireless Mode' (set to 'Managed'). I have not yet set up the WEP stuff, but will attempt to do so shortly.

Stuff I haven't tried yet

I haven't tried the Firewire port yet.

Pawel got the modem running (he thinks), I haven't tried yet. Check back later. This uses the Conexant modem drivers for Linux, but with the pre-built drivers you must use 'lspci' to first grok out the PCI device ID since it is not a standard Conexant device ID. I downloaded the driver as a source gzip and followed the instructions to build an RPM with it (rpm -ta sf*.tar.gz) and then installed the RPM that got built. When I did hsconfig and asked it to automatically detect my modem, it properly did so. Apparently the issue that Pawel ran into (where it did not properly detect the ALI version of the Conexant modem) has been fixed, at least in the tarball. But I haven't tried actually dialing anybody with it (I did connect to the modem "port" and typed a few AT commands to verify that at least I could do that much).

Playing DVD's

I played a DVD that I bought and own on my "illegal circumvention device" (my Linux laptop). Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that makes me a criminal.

I got the software from the Penguin Liberation Front. Once I added it into my software sources list as directed on that site, I selected 'mplayer' as my movie player (I also tried Xine, but could not get it to work). I had to do 'ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd', and then it immediately recognized my DVD. Playback is a bit jerkier than under Windows (since it's being done entirely by software with no hardware speedups like on the Windows side), but is acceptable for watching a movie in a window while doing other things on the computer.

One thing that you *will* note is that, since it's working the CPU hard plus using a lot of juice to turn the DVD spindle, the laptop's cooling fans (all three of them!) will switch into high speed mode (which sounds vaguely like a room-sized fan) and then, after a while, switch into turbo-speed mode (which sounds kinda like a vacuum cleaner at full blast!). I haven't switched back to Windows yet to see if that happens when playing a DVD under Windows, but I suspect not, since the Windows driver makes use of hardware to decode the DVD.

Burning CD/RWs

It Just Works(tm). I use xcdroast as my CD burner of choice, and it auto-detected and everything. No problems there.

Performance

This thing is faster'n'snot. I mean it. Software compiles like the blazes, and you *never* have to wait. *UNLESS* you forget to turn on the DMA and IRQ flags on the hard drive controllers.

Make sure you have the 'hdparm' command installed ('urpmi hdparm' at a root prompt will make sure of that), then add to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local the following lines:

hdparm -d1 -u1 /dev/hda
hdparm -d1 -u1 /dev/hdb

Your disk drives will thank you (and you will definitely notice the performance increase when the drives start up!).

Stuff that doesn't work right

Okay, since you may have gotten the impression that all is peaches and cream, here's what doesn't work right:

Suspend/Resume: Nope, won't do it.
Scroll "bar" on the touchpad -- useless.
'Disable touchpad' button -- doesn't do a thing. The only way to disable the touchpad is to plug in an external PS/2 mouse, which then disables it (something I dislike, on my old Compaq I could have both the mouse and the touchpad working at the same time). One of these days I'd like to see if I can reprogram it to work as a middle mouse button (ChordMiddle sucks).
Volume controls on side -- nope, they don't do a thing (unlike on my old Compaq). You have to pull up the volume control in KDE to turn down the volume (including that annoying loud 'beep' that is the system bell!).
You can't switch back and forth between console mode and GUI mode using ALT-F1, you'll lock up "X" when you go back into GUI mode. To be fair, this also happened with my old Compaq, and appears to be a generic issue with many recent chipsets under XFree86.

Stuff I don't like

The CD bay is on the right side, right where it slams into a mouse if you want to put a CD or DVD into it.
This thing has not one, not two, but *THREE* fans, and apparently three basic fan speed/configurations -- mild, high, and wild. If you do a lengthy kernel compile or watch a DVD, you get to hear the 'wild' speed, which is akin to a vacuum cleaner's roar as all three fans kick in at their highest speed. While these fans do a great job of keeping things cool, they suck their air from under the laptop, meaning you can't really put this laptop on your lap unless you're careful not to block the fan intakes.
Battery life sucks. My old Compaq would often go 3 hours on a full charge. This guy is lucky to go two hours, and that's only if you aren't doing something CPU-intensive, in which case you're lucky to get an hour and a half. Buy an extra battery and carry it with you if you are going to make a long airline trip with no place to plug in a laptop.
It has no little "legs" for lifting the tail of the laptop to lean the keyboard towards me, and the laptop itself is quite "chunky", making it a bit of a pain in the wrist.
The hinges for the LCD lid look a bit flimsy. One thing you had to say about my old Compaq, those hinges were *CHUNKY*. Two years of hard (and I mean HARD) use, and while the laptop case looked a bit battered, the hinges had not a creak nor a crack.

General conclusions

This thing is fast, has a huge hard drive, and tons of RAM (up to 1GB of RAM). All the major hardware works (aside from insignificant things like the touchpad disable button and the volume control keys), the display is sharp, it has a decent feature set, and the little nuisances you have to put up with (like the short battery life) are generally livable and no worse than the nuisances you have to put up with on other laptops (all of which, nowdays, seem to use special-purpose hardware that takes a lot of work to get Linux to work with). All in all, for the price ($1599!), this thing works quite well under Linux. I really wanted a laptop with USB2 and maybe a DVD-RW drive, but a) Linux doesn't support USB2 well yet, b) Fry's Electronics put this one on sale for $1599, and c) when I checked on Google, I found that many people had already gotten this laptop working with Linux, while the Sony and Fujitsu models that had all the features didn't seem to work well with Linux, so ...

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