I may be able to help with the Mandrake side of things...

Jeff Nelson wrote:

> Mandrake 9.2 installs and finds the Broadcom NIC, but not the 
> wireless. Other problems: sound is muted and the "troubleshooting" 
> instructions don't seem to work (aumix is not available); wireless is 
> not configured; power management is broken (says battery is at zero on 
> fully-charged batter). XFree86 doesn't come up correctly unless the 
> display is set to "vesa"; none of the Radeon display settings work but 
> they should.

The Radeon card is a Mobility Radeon, which is not a "True Radeon", and 
from what I've seen on mine, is frame buffers tend to screw them up.  
Check your boot loader and remove any options for vga=???, and use the 
radeon driver, fbdev will probably give you problems.  You can install 
aumix as root with (urpmi aumix).  Mandrake only supports a limited 
amount of wireless cards, I'd need to know the model and chipset to 
point you in the right direction for a driver...  The APCI function on 
my laptop needs to be restarted after booting in order to work.  Try 
running these in a script as root:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/acpi restart
/etc/rc.d/init.d/acpid restart
This fixed my laptop.  Add those a boot script or something...

> Mandrake 10.0 (cooker 20031231) fixes the power messages, but power 
> management isn't turned on in the kernel. Sound is still broken, 
> wireless adaptor is still not found. Radeon (fbdev) doesn't work, but 
> plain Radeon does. Internal modem not configured either (probably 
> broken in 9.2 as well as other distributions, but have not confirmed).

Frame buffers don't work well with laptop Mobility Radeon cards (see 
above), and this kinda shows that.  The internal modem is a winmodem, I 
haven't worked with those yet.

> 1. I am not tied to a particular distribution and am willing to try 
> another. Recommendations accepted.

Good to hear...  Even if you like a certain distro, you can still learn 
tricks from others.

> 2. sound. ALSA snd-intel8x0 is the default module and it is loaded. 
> The PCI ID is 8086:24c5:103c:0890, description is "ICH4 845G/GL 
> Chipset AC'97 Audio Controller". The external light indicating MUTE is 
> turned on, but pressing buttons to raise/lower volume or unmute have 
> no effect. I have run a character-based mixer program (the usual 
> troubleshooting advice say to run aumix but that is not installed!) 
> and verified that volumes are up and nothing is muted except the 
> microphone. What next?

For Mandrake, urpmi is your friend.  (man urpmi)  As root, type this 
command in (urpmi aumix).  Get a volume mixer installed and see if the 
soundcard is really working or not.  I have the same card in mine, and 
it works fine.  2.6 kernels with alsa default to zero volume at boot, so 
I'd check that.  The extra buttons on your keyboard probably don't have 
a driver for XFree86, and if they do, Mandrake probably doesn't ship 
them, and if they do, they certainly wont have any bindings to them.  I 
havn't gotten mine to work yet either, but I also havn't needed them.  
If you really want them available, google the XFree86 website and see if 
you can find some mention of them.

> 3. Wireless network configuration. I really need this to work and am 
> not sure what I need to do. The PCI ID is 168c:0013:0e11:00e5.

Not sure what to do with a PCI ID, a chipset, or make/model number would 
work though.  The chipset is the key though...

> 4. Need to enable power management options in Kernel and rebuild.

Personally, the 2.6.x kernels are working so well for me that I won't be 
using Mandrake's kernel.  I recommend building your own, or having 
someone help you.  You'll have to get a good amount of hardware info 
before you do though.

> Any advice is greatly appreciated.
>
> -Jeff

Well I hope this helps a little...  Good luck...

Chris Frederick



_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list