How I wrestled Linux onto the Clevo D870P
d870p
My boss at the time bought one of these expensive high end gamer's laptops for development use, having ignored all my discussions with him about cheaper and more suitable machines. As we developed under Linux I had to try and get the hardware working before I could use it ...
Linux on D870P - Quick contents:
- Hardware - compatible BIOS updates
- Distro - distro adventures
- Hardware discovery - works well
- Promise PDC20264 RAID controller - kernel woes and corruption
- X11 - X.org great
- Video card - ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]
- Touchpad - ALPS Glidepoint
- Wired Lan - Gigabit RTL8169
- Wireless Lan - Ralink RT2500
- Bison Cam - not yet supported
- Power Saving - cut that *****y fan noise down !
- What I haven't tried yet (Bluetooth, Firewire, IrDA)
- Screenshots
Update: after this article was written, I suffered the most catastrophic filesystem corruption yet due to the Promise RAID driver bugs, and I was unable to recover from it. I gave the D870P back to my boss. After another six months, I saw him using it as a very hot, noisy and slow desktop, because the battery life had dropped to about 10 minutes ...