Over the weekend I had the opportunity to install 2007.1 on a HP TX1120 laptop (a tablet). This is a really slick laptop; it’s an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 (1.8GHz), with 2GB RAM, a Seagate 160GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 (ok, the graphics card leaves a little to be desired as it’s a 64MB card that can use shared memory (up to 512MB I think)), DVD DL writer, synaptics touchpad, a Broadcom (“Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI) 802.11b/g card, NVIDIA nForce gigabit ethernet, Realtek High Def audio card, and the touchscreen itself (an eGalaxy thing). Came pre-installed with Vista Home Premium.
First: Vista is awful! Ick!
Second: Mandriva 2007.1 installs and runs really nice on this, with a few caveats. I used the 32bit version (tried the 64bit one as well, it seems to work no worse than the 32bit although the throughput from the wireless card seems lower), and the wireless card works with ndiswrapper. Sound doesn’t work (yet, I’ve done some reading and it seems like this card isn’t really liked). The bcm43xx driver does not work (no choice but to use ndiswrapper). The graphics display was properly detected and configured. Putting the thing to sleep (hibernation, suspend? no idea what to call it, I pushed a button by accident and it went to sleep and wouldn’t properly resume).
The touchscreen doesn’t seem to work at all. Not sure if I’m missing something, but MCC doesn’t seem to offer anything to configure it, there’s nothing special noted in the xorg.conf file, and the reading I’ve done that pointed to a callibration tool and a driver have done nothing for me yet.
All in all, it’s a really nice laptop. Might have to get myself one of these; my Toshiba Libretto is being under-used because my fingers are too fat to work on the keyboard properly. But this guy is pretty small (smaller than my macbook), although the glossy back makes fingerprints really stick out and the screen itself is really amusing to look at after my daughter does some writing on it (in Vista, unfortunately). Haven’t tried the SD card reader yet to see if that works, but as it stands now, it’s very very usable (although sound and the tablet itself working would be a really nice bonus.