added to the list of distros that fully support this laptop (minus wireless): Fedora Core Development (x86_64, of course)

seeing as this is the development version, it is, of course, a bit buggy (so far, the only noticable thing would be some lag)

then again... that could be the 4200rpm HD <_<

anyone have this working yet with FC5 (the mx7515)

yep, i tryed that yesterday... everything works

still no wireless, of course

I've finally installed Fedora Core 5 and I've noticed the following without any additional work:

1) Network card is working right out of the box
2) Sound is working good

Then with some more work around the Wireless stuff I've been able to get this working.

I followed the ndiswrapper installation and used the recommended BCMWL5 driver from their site (WL_.....). Using this the card was found and actually working.

Now I've also set up the WPA-PSK stuff but wpa_supplicant isn't coming up correctly to detect the wireless settings on boot - grrr.

Otherwise it seems this laptop is now screaming very nicely using Fedora Core 5 x86_64.

Reiner

rgr... ill try this out on the factory OpenSuSE (x86_64) tonight

How do you partition this hard drive to dual boot with linux and windows? the last time i tried it, linux would boot up, but when i click on windows, it brought up the gateway recovery screen and i couldn't get it into windows without formatting, so i've been affraid to try it since. How did yall set it up for dual boot? Did you put the linux partition b4 the windows, after the recovery, or in between the two? (And was it the 64 version of FC5 that got everything to work)?

ok, first off, if you didnt already do it, reformat the hard drive so you dont have the recovery partition at all, and better yet, reinstall windows, because gateway puts alot of crapware on their systems...

make sure you leave empty partition space for linux, then install...

should work

PS. The distro I'm typing on is SuSE Linux 10.0 x86_64, which I've found to be the most functional on this computer (it still has x11 6.8, so I can use the ATI drivers for OpenGL), If you dont need OpenGL hardware excelleration, then by all means go for a newer distro... although if you can, look for one with the upcoming 2.6.17 kernel, which is supposed to have the reverse-engineered wireless drivers for these things!

i don't have an actual copy of windows xp, i just have the gateway restoration cd that came with the laptop, is this an actual copy of windows xp?

to a cetain extent... yes

the only difference is, it only installs windows on the first partition with NTFS

how am i supposed to completely format the hard drive and delete the restoration section if i just have the gateway restoration cd?

you cant... atleast, i dont think you can...

ok let me rephrase that last question, if i format my entire hard drive, will the gateway restoration cd be all i need to reinstall windows?

If you haven't backed up the restoration partition do so before installing Windows. I dind't and there's no good way to go back to Windows as the CD provided is just Windows XP without any drivers, applications, etc. Good that I don't want to reinstall Windows anyways on this machine.

well i had to format due to a virus and when i tried to recover it weather i did destructive or with backup it said ntds is compressed (something of that sort) press ctrl alt del to restart. So i had to borrow a windows xp cd to format the entire drive, then i used my recovery cd to install windows, then i had to download all the drivers from gateways website on my linux pc and copy them to a flash drive to install them to the laptop. Few good things came out of this. 1) I don't have gateways crap on here anymore 2) It is actually letting me use all of the hard drive space 3) It got rid of the recovery partition, so now it makes installing fedora core 4 that much easier.

that was the first thing i did when i got this laptop...

umm... if you're looking for drivers and cant find them off the gateway site (for example, the 64-bit drivers for windows xp x64), you can find them at http://blackimperial.com/home/?page_id=13

as for the ati drivers, i really recommend the ATI Omega drivers found at omegadrivers.net