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Thu, 16 Aug 2007

Laptop software update.

I have a HP nc6000 laptop, which is quite old and with its 256 mb of ram is not very convenient smetimes, and is a bit heavy to carry it everyday, but I like it (interesting note, it had 3 years of wrranty (likely it has not ended yet), but its price dropped three times after I bought it).
Long time ago I installed Debian Woody there and it worked perfectly ok, but then hard drive broke, and after replace I installed there Debian Etch and got 100% CPU usage when watching a film on the full screen (which did not work as a full screen, only in maximized window). Network adapter (tg3) was also broken - one day after deep hibernate it woke up, was likely so much surprised about changed world and decided to stop working. It can not be reset, although pci config space is perfectly valid for the card and registers seems to be ok (i.e. do not contain 0xff or all zeroes), but NIC just does not work.
Also after I changed disk (in official HP service center on warranty), rfcomm/bluetooth leds started to work incorrectly.

Today I decided to reinstall the system and tried FC7. Right now it works quite good, except without network it is a bit unconvenient to work with. For example default yum repositories are in network, without network it fails to resolve dependencies (i.e. it can say that you need to install a, b, and c to satisfy d's deps, but can not install them and fails with python stack trace). When pressing power button, laptop's screen becomes grey and nothing happens, this can only be fixed by powering system off pressing power button for a longer time. Hibernate failed I first time tried it in FC7 (system was not able to wake up and was frozen after X were recovered). In Debian it was ok, but sucked all battery power in quite a short of time. I will eventually test it in FC7, but not now. Network (tg3) does not work too, likely it is hardware problem. Video can be watched perfectly ok (even big mpeg4), which is good, but otherwise things are quite bad.

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