July 2006. Installing SuSe Linux 10 on my new BenQ Joybook R55, with a
Centrino Duo processor, was very nearly straight forward, with a couple of
issues.
From the DVD, the installation proceeded smoothly, in the usual sweet SuSe way,
even to recognising the very new (as of July 2006) geForce 7400 screen
'out-of-the-box', via the VESA setup. I mention the screen because Debian
(Sarge) seemed to struggle with this in a very big way from the beginning.
The NVidia LCD Monitor:
The monitor is a NVidia geForce 7400, and the solution for Debian was to
download the appropriate driver, (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run.txt), from
NVidia (http://www.nvidia.com) and to run this as root. Following the simple
instructions, (just run the script and answer a couple of short questions), the
driver installed flawlessly and the screen was usable under X immediately.
While SuSe was able to provide an X server with this screen from the start, it
too benefited from the application of this same NVIDIA patch, giving a clean and
crisp display.
The Ethernet card:
Both SuSe and Debian failed to recognise the Ethernet card from Marvell: a
Yukon GiGabit 8055. Although the sk98 driver was apparently available in the
kernel, (the option was available via menuconfig), the driver was sufficiently
out of synch with the hardware to be useless. Windoze of course recognised the
card, but communicavity with Linux was not to be had without some fiddling.
The solution is to download the latest linux driver, (install-8_40.tar), from
SysKonnect (http://www.syskonnect.com), and to run this following the
instructions, as root, which are nearly as foolproof as the NVIDIA script
described above.
The sneaky thing about this driver, was that as soon as Linux worked, I
booted back into Windoze to check that everything was still ok there too. Sure
enough, it had stopped working with a wierd: "ethernet cable is unplugged"
message, either because Linux had turned the card off, which was in some way
unexpected, or because Windoze could not turn it on without having the last
word, (without turning it off personally), or some such nonsense. Believe it
or not, the solution for this was to download and install the latest driver for
Windoze too, (yk51x86.zip), from the SysKonnect site. Once this was done, the
network card worked seamlessly from both Linux and Windoze, whichever was
booted in whatever sequence, just like it's supposed to in the first place...
Note that for both drivers, described above, you probably need the linux kernel
sources installed under /usr/src/linux, and possibly some other pre-requisites,
but these are all better described via the 2 driver installation scripts
mentioned above, than here. As an aside, I managed to get Debian running on
the BenQ, by installing it in a
VMWare
Virtual Machine, at which point (because of the abstacted network interface),
everything worked quite well.
Compare this experience with the several SuSe 7, 8, 9 and 10 installations on a
Sony PCMG notebook.
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