Hardware: Sager 4250 Laptop (see review).

Overall: SuSE 8.1 (Linux 2.4.19) works well. Installation was easier than the equivalent Windows installation. There were minor configuration problems that were covered in the manual.

Purchased Configuration: I purchased this system pre-configured to dual boot Windows 2000 and Linux from PCs for Everyone. They partitioned, installed Windows 2000, installed the freeware RedHat, and confirmed that everything worked.

The setup testing is noteworthy. They do more than rudimentary installs. They test to confirm that everything is working properly. So the necessary partitioning for hibernation is present, etc. This introduced some delay because all their new wireless cards are using the TI ACX-100 chipset, and there is not yet a Linux driver for that chipset. So they went through the hassles of tracking down an older card and getting it to work. This saved me a lot of frustrations.

Installation: I ignored the residual freeware RH Linux and did a from scratch installation of SuSE 8.1 Professional. I let the SuSE installer run the whole show other than answering the usual questions about what partition to use and what software to install. There were two glitches:

1. It did not detect the wireless card
2. It did not detect the LCD information

It installed a dual boot GRUB, which works fine for booting both Linux and Windows 2000. The LCD came up in 600x800 VGA mode.

Fix 1 (LCD resolution): I manually configured the display size using the SuSE setup tools. It offered a 1400x1050 LCD as an option. I selected it, the test screen looked great, and the display problem was fixed. It now selects 1400x1050 all the time. My guess is that the SuSE configure program detected the CRT port, found no CRT, and gave up.

Fix 2, Problem 2 (802.11b PC card): I manually selected wireless card support from the GUI tool to add hardware. (This is suggested by the SuSE paper manual for cases where wireless cards are not autodetected. Note two important differences from Windows. There is a relevant paper manual and it provides useful answers.)

It installed and configured almost correctly. There is a problem with starting the dhcpd client and establishing routing on a hotplug. I need to do this manually by using the command "dhcpd eth1". Since everything else works, this indicates that there is a problem with the SuSE 8.1 hotplug scripts. It isn't a big enough issue for me to have tracked it down yet.

Update: SuSE 8.2 didn't fix this. But still not much of a problem.

Mouse upgrade: I added a USB wireless mouse to the system. The initial plugin triggered an automatic mouse recognition script and let me test the mouse and then configured the system to use it. Viola. A working wireless mouse.

The GUI configuration tools and startup scripts made it easy to switch back and forth from USB mouse to touchpad, but did not configure the system to support both at once. Since I wanted both at once, I manually edited the /etc/X11/XFConfig file to activate both with the option that they are allowed to fail. This also stopped the configuration change triggering.

The wireless mouse is highly annoying when the batteries are low or the signal is weak due to distance or obstacles. It drops events. Dropping a mouse up event confuses window managers and applications into thinking that you are doing a drag operation.

Update: I've given up on the wireless mouse. It is too much hassle. It's either the USB optical mouse or the touchpad. I'm using the tpconfig package to disable the touchpad click features. There is reportedly a driver that gives decent control over the touch-scroll, touch-click, and similar features of the mouse. I find the click emulation annoying, so I disable these on both Windows and Linux.

Fix 3 (ACPI): The ACPI support in the BIOS, Linux 2.4.19, or both is not ready for use. After reading the paper manual (again proving to be useful) I tried the "-noapci" flag in GRUB. Linux reverted to APM support. wmbattery now properly displays battery state.

Wmbattery also introduced annoying little hiccups in the keyboard, mouse, and screen response. I tracked this down to the APM driver in Linux. It messes up scheduling while getting APM information. This is probably due to self-protection against BIOS behavior. Rather than deal with the mysteries of APM, which is obsolescent, I slowed the APM checking from 1s interval to 30s interval. The hiccup still happens, but not to a noticable level.

Problem 4 (APM Standby): I have tried manually invoking the transition to standby through APM. It appears to enter standby mode. The laptop also returns from this mode, but the screen display is scrambled. The usual CTL-ALT-+ to exit X windows returns the display to VGA text mode. So I think that the Linux portion of APM standby is working properly. There is a video restore after standby problem in X.

I recall reading about this, and it may be fixed in the current CVS version of X. It might also be some configuration thing. I've not tracked down the details.

Problem 5 (SpeedStep): The Windows 2000 includes proper SpeedStep controls. The review above mentions some earlier problems. I had no problems. But Linux 2.4 lacks SpeedStep support. When Linux 2.6 stabilizes SpeedStep support should be there. It is present in the later 2.5 series, but I'm not putting any of those onto a production laptop. So until Linux 2.6 is ready, the machine runs at 1000 MHz whether on AC or battery power. With Win2k it will drop down to 700 MHz when on battery. This saves up to 20 watts. The Linux system issues HLT instructions while idle, so actual savings are harder to measure.