Well, I've pretty much gotten everything installed and running well in
Debian on my Compaq Armada 7770. The 233 MHz processor is a little
underpowered, but the 144 MB of RAM keeps things from slowing down too
much. I had a little trouble viewing some windows on the 800x600 screen
with both Gnome panels open, so I consolidated everything into the top
one, and it's been working well. I'd take a screenshot, but it's pretty
boring.
The only thing I haven't been able to get working yet is ALSA sound.
From what I've read, the automatic setups don't work very well for the
card in this laptop, so that could have something to do with it. I
guess I can just look at it as a learning experience...
One thing I've really enjoyed in Linux is being able to do so much from
the command line. In fact, I'm writing this post in w3m, just for
kicks. And writing shell scripts has been a fun way to automate tasks.
And the whole sparse interface is great for a slower machine such as
this...
** Update @ midnight: I got the sound working, after doing a manual
"modprobe snd-es18xx". It works fine playing wav clips, but hung the
entire system when I tried to adjust the volume during mp3 playback, and
also hung when I tried to play a video. It could just be limitations of
the machine, but I'll have to do a little tweaking to find out for sure.
Right now, I'm just happy to have some sound! **
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