FC3 and now FC4 are on this laptop:

Linux (Fedora Core 3)

Got this machine as refurbished January 20, 2005. BIOS hides a hidden partition, even linux doesn't see it. So, instead of 40GB i got 36 GB.. 
First impressions:

   - calling IBM was fast, but odly they don't give out install media
     anymore, even within 30 days. The price has also increased from $35
     to $50 !!!  That makes it an easy decision to keep

   - installing XP took 90 minutes, including repetative reboots, luckily
     mostly unattended. 

   - installing FC3 took 30 minutes. Mostly worked.  Of course i wanted	
     diskspace, so XP is all but gone (i.e. it's on the hidden partition)

	Some tinkering:

	- apm works if you add "acpi=off" in the boot loading (i used grub)
        - acpi also works, including suspend (i did't try disk suspend)
	- wireless works too, but needs the iw2100 drivers.  The default
    	  2.6.9-1.667 didn't have it, but it compiled and ran fine via
 	  manual install
	  Subsequent kernels had an older version of iw2100 installed, but
	  i could not get it to work yet. 
	  2.6.10-1.760 was the last one i tried.

Linux (Fedora Core 4)

The upgrade went flawlessly, which is always nice. A few notes/surprises: 

- gcc is 4.0, g77 is 3.2, gfortran (not g95, which is what the GNU tar balls
  deliver).   gcc32 is the old 3.2.3 compiler.

- the new gnome 2.10 decided i wanted to auto-screenlock after some timeout.
  well, i don't. what a nuisance now to find out where this is located.

- of course still no xmms with mp3 (but aac and wma seem to have plugins now).
  what a nuisance. livna.org has a lot of nice extras, and with an extra
     rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/4/i386/RPMS.lvn/livna-release-4-0.lvn.2.4.noarch.rpm
  the 'yum' tool is autoamticaly setup for updates from livna.

 - still didn't try acpi

Ubuntu 5.10

Installed November 2005. 

nice babysitting job, seems to work well. still getting used to this
different style of install and use, but it looks promising.
This laptop has had some intermitted (read: mostly) annoying problems with the video. You would have to warp/bend the base to get the video back. This has been going on since 2008 or so... Every now and then i try and boot it, and it sort of works, for a little bit. and then hangs. pretty much useless now.
This page was last modified on 20-Dec-2010 by teuben@astro.umd.edu.