6625WD and (Mandriva) Linux review.

Well, I've had my 6625 for around a week now and having got most stuff working on it I have to say I am very happy. It's been a bit of a struggle for one reason or another, but hopefully thins thread will help and encourage others who want to run Linux on this model.

My spec is this:

T7500 Core Duo 2.2G 4M cache
1GB DDR2 800/PC6400
120G 7200rpm SATA HDD
DVD R/W
nvidia 8600M GT 512M RAM graphics card
UK keyboard.
Intel Pro Wireless 4965AGN

Hardware wise, the screen is gorgeous, even with the open source drivers the screen looked fabulous straight off - I love these new style glossy screens. The keyboard is nothing like as bad as people have made it out to be in other reviews, quite acceptable in fact. The machine is quiet, again I'd seen lots of reviews complaining about noisy fans, but this machine is just fine (way quieter than the HP laptops we have in work). The only thing to complain about really is the lousy battery life.

On to the operating system:

I started out with Mandriva Spring (2007.1) which I already had running on a P4 desktop and laptop and a Core Duo desktop, so was confident this would work just fine as I'd seen other people running the Intel wireless card on Linux.

Although I could get the nvidia drivers working well and I'd seen other people say the WiFi worked smoothly after install, the WiFi wouldn't work for me, so coupled with no DVD and no sound I thought I'd try the latest cooker (kind of beta) release for Mandriva 2008.

2008 RC (release candidate) 2 is the very latest stable snapshot from Mandriva and this, indeed, had the Wireless working no problem. The nvidia packages again had the proprietary graphics going. Mandriva's excellent control centre installing all dependencies with no issues. With that driver the graphics are faster, and with the enable render graphics acceleration, the rather bizarre phenomenon of fast graphics, but slow text scrolling was solved!

The DVD drive took an age to get going. It was solved by simply disabling the DVD in the BIOS (sic), but I think, from what the Mandriva developers have said, there is some sort of driver issue that will get sorted. There are obviously issues here though as Vista suffers in the same was according to other threads on this forum. I have since seen someone on Linuxquestions say they have a fix for this which I will port a link to.

The sound was the most problematic and solved by upgrading alsa and adding a vital line to a config file.

Go here and get the Realtek codecs:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads...=3&GetDown=false#High Definition Audio Codecs

There is a readme file in that tar that details what to do. (I actually think this is just alsa, but there may be more stuff in it.)

For Mandriva you need to mod the /etc/modprobe.d/sound file by adding at the bottom:

options snd-hda-intel model=toshiba index=0

The mic seems to work ok as well.

No luck on the webcam at all (although I haven't tried that hard) and haven't tried Firewire (on any computer let alone this), although Control Centre recognises it.

It's a nice laptop and is very fast indeed - as quick as most desktops you'll come across. I am pleased with it and Iann's pre and post sales efforts have been top notch.