- Power Management:
- Supports APM, with unchangeable caveats when on battery:
- No indication of battery time remaining, only percentage
of battery life
(workaround: ibam)
- Machine shuts off at some percentage of battery life
remaining, whether you like it or not (I think it's 15%)
- Screen blanks after 30 seconds with no input
(USB mouse not considered input)
- Machine suspends after five minutes with no input
(USB mouse still not considered input)
- Prefers ACPI, but as of Linux 2.4.20,
Linux support not good enough to be useful;
patches from the Linux
ACPI project
may help, but without the proper DSDT changes may burn up
your computer, so I've shied away so far.
This may help:
Getting
ACPI to work on a Compaq Evo N410c running Linux How-To
- Ethernet: Intel, e100
driver (eepro100 works but
hangs;
though I've actually had both hang on me, so I may have a hardware problem)
- Modem: Lucent (Agere) LT Winmodem ("LTmodem"),
working binary-only driver available
- Audio: ESS Allegro ES1988, maestro3 driver
- Video: ATI Rage Mobility M1, ati driver (XFree86 4.1.x or higher)
- LCD is 1024x768x24 bit
- TV-out works if it's connected on bootup
- I haven't gotten a good X display on the TV when using X's
ati driver, but the vesa framebuffer displays fine on the TV
when booted with vga=0x318, 0x312, or 0x315.
- Pointer: 3-button "eraserhead", PS/2 driver
- Keyboard
and related buttons
- "Win95" keyboard -- one Windows key, one Menu key
(I use the Windows key as a meta key, and the Menu key as
a compose key for accented characters)
- Esc key is tiny and too close to ~/` key; Fn key is
where I expect Ctrl key
- Fn combinations:
- Fn-F2: toggles power to wireless adapter on "multiport"
(on cover)
- Fn-F4: toggles external video
- Fn-F5: (volume)
doesn't work
- Fn-F6: lock? doesn't work ?
- Fn-F7:
battery? doesn't work ?
- Fn-F8: battery time left -
doesn't work?
- Fn-F10: (brightness) toggles control
of brightness
with left and right arrow keys
- Hotkey buttons usable with
hotkeys (keyboard type kb9963; button names Help,
WebBrowser, Search, Email),
or possibly FunKeys)
- Volume buttons don't work
- USB: works, UHCI driver;
I compile modules for all possible USB devices just in case
- Infrared: I haven't tried it, though I'd love to be able to use
my laptop as a TV remote control
- Multiport (on cover) 802.11b wireless adapter:
- Multiport is USB interface with different type of
connector
- Multiport 802.11b adapter uses prism2 chip
-
Supported by
linux-wlan-ng project
(which is still somewhat primitive) since 0.1.14-pre3, but
unreliable with WEP (firmware bug?), still stops after a few
minutes even without WEP, and machine freezes if module is
removed. (For now I use a Cisco Aironet PC-card instead)
Firmware upgrade available.
- Mobile Expansion Unit (MEU):
Peripherals in "multibays" work only if connected during bootup
- Force power-off: hold suspend and power switches
simultaneously
- If machine powers itself off due to low battery, sometimes
it won't come back after connecting power. Resolution:
disconnect all power and batteries, then hold the power button
on for a minute. Then reconnect power, turn on (it lives!),
and reconnect batteries.
- I have an IDE-to-USB adapter for attaching an external hard
disk, as well as the Compaq multibay DVD/CD-RW drive in my
MEU. But when both are connected, the USB driver hangs in
initialization (Win2K seems to behave the same way).
I think the adapter is screwy.
Other pages on this laptop or similar models:
Rob Funk <rfunk@funknet.net>