you.gotfoo.org

Installing
Installing Fedora Core 5 on this rig was pretty easy. The only iffy area is the monitor. I first tried Generic LCD but it rendered everything skewed in 1024. I went into setup -> xconfig -> hardware and select Gateway and then ???????. I did this a few time until I got the screen to render in 1128x768 nicely.

Gateway MX6440
full spec

Update Fedora
Once the system is running the first thing you should do is update FC5 using Yum Extender. First you need to install Yum Extenter as root:

enter the root password and then type:

Yum Extender should now appear in Applications -> System Tools but if not do this:

Once Yum Extender launches click the Update icons and the list will refresh. Now don't go nuts and select everything. You should start small by first updating only the kernel.
Continue updating only a few packages at a time going from the most important to the least important. YumEx will display a running total of the size of the selected packages and try to keep this around 50MB. Anything more seems to take for ever. I tried to update everything at once it it ran for two hours and only downladed 25% of the packages. Needless to say I aborted this and went for a few packs at a time.

NTFS
I kind of got NTFS working but when it sees the NTFS drive it tells me I do not kave permission. I logged in at root and accessed my External USB NTFS drive and tried to change the permissions. Although as root I can see and open the files (mp3's) I still get denied whne trying to change the drive permissions. I used some stuff from www.linux-ntfs.org/ but it was pretty confusing to understand.
I would recomend starting here to get a read-only system running.

The A/V Club
So far following FC5 Tips and Tricks and using xmms I can listen to MP3's. Jsut follow FC5 Tips and Tricks and you''l have A/V apps working with very few problems.
I have read that some people cannot get audio working on this laptop once they upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro. Boo Hoo :p

VNC
If you are going to use VNC Server be sure that if you choose to install the firewall that you have a port open for the VNC connection. I spent hours trying to connect to the laptop only to realize that the eventhough the VNC Server was running and configured the firewall was blocking the incoming request on the VNC port!!
On the other hand I was able to connect to my wife's WinXP box with no problems. I was able to launch FireFox and start downloading stuff as well as firing up Visual Studio and working on app. But audio does not work nor does launching the game FIFA 2006. FIFA launched but the VNC Clinet went totally wacky so I do not recommend trying that.

Other Linux Distros: Kanotix, Knoppix and SimplyMEPIS
I really wanted to run Kanotix 2005-4 on this bad boy but for some reason it hang when configuring the hard-ware. This is also the case for Knoppix (4.0.1, 5.0 and 5.0.1). SimplyMEPIS was a total mess. Although it did find most of the HW the system was reacting in hyper-mode. When I typed 'w' it would type 'www' and when watching video on youtube it played it in 1.5x time like an olde tim movie. Oh the little fish applet was was zoomig so fast it looked like the fish had rockes strapped to them.