[ale] laptop advice

[Neal Rhodes]

I bought an HP dv7-1245dx in the last few months.   My experiences with
Ubuntu:

Ubuntu 8.10 recognized neither the built-in ethernet nor the wireless.
(Atheros)

Dropping back to 8.04 it recognized the ethernet port, but not the
wireless.   Eventually after much diddling, I found some references on
removing the supplied modules and downloading the madwifi drivers and
that works, so long as you run Gnome.  If you login to KDE, no wireless.
If you login to Gnome, then logout and login to KDE, then your wireless
connection is maintained.   

And if you any standard patch updates that change the kernel or some
other pieces, it hoses the wireless and you get to run the make and make
install again. 

So, overall I'd have to say I'm not thrilled with Ubuntu support for
bleeding edge notebooks.  However, at least I've got video support,
unlike the Fedora Core 10 madness with Intel video chips. 

Neal Rhodes.