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Yup -- I'd read that was necessary to get the audio working.

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I have not tried them on a limited memory machine, though.

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Maybe gentoo - at least it allows you to pick and choose exactly what you include and what you don't.

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I only recommend Kubuntu and/or Ubuntu these days. Head and shoulders above most of the crud.

I had a feeling that might be your recommendation.

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I have not tried them on a limited memory machine, though. Even our "discarded" laptops here have 512MB each (2GB in the new ones). Ubuntu should do somewhat better than Kubuntu for this, though (KDE/Kubuntu is fantastic, but yes, it's a memory hog).

Yeah, I knew that, already. I use KDE both at work, and at home. I'll take a look at it, and see what I think. I suspect I'll have to/want to move away from KDE to a more lightweight window manager.

Though, since Windows ME runs fine on it, I figure that KDE shouldn't be too terribly slow.

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Yup -- I'd read that was necessary to get the audio working.

Ah. Didn't know it was in specific howtos for the Z505LS. On my old VAIO PCG-F305 I had to disable PNP otherwise it would panic during boot.

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Maybe gentoo - at least it allows you to pick and choose exactly what you include and what you don't.

Although it's not a point and click install, it'll teach you a lot about the inner workings of Linux.

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I have not tried them on a limited memory machine, though. Even our "discarded" laptops here have 512MB each (2GB in the new ones). Ubuntu should do somewhat better than Kubuntu for this, though (KDE/Kubuntu is fantastic, but yes, it's a memory hog).

Yeah, I knew that, already. I use KDE both at work, and at home. I'll take a look at it, and see what I think. I suspect I'll have to/want to move away from KDE to a more lightweight window manager.

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Maybe gentoo

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Maybe gentoo

It worked for me back when I had a R600MX.

Ah, thanks for the link.

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I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is green to Linux and also impatient. It is a little bit like jumping in the deep end, but it is the fastest way to learn!

I may or may not fit the 'impatient' description.

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The R600MX was also happy with Fedora, Ubuntu and Knoppix btw - I had them all on there at some point, and no issues in any of them. I am very surprised you are running into teething problems.

I ran knoppix with no problem, as well. I suspect the problem is that, the difference between these systems (though I don't know for sure about Fedora) is that they have text-based installs, while SuSE is a GUI based install -- with rather unreasonable memory requirements. :-p

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I only recommend Kubuntu and/or Ubuntu these days. Head and shoulders above most of the crud.

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- system settings -> accessibility -> KHotKeys
- New Group, set the name to something like "accent keys". Then move the group
to the top (or into some appropriate folder, whatever you like)
- New Action,
- set the name to something appropriate, like F11-US-kbd
- set the Action type to "Keyboard Shortcut -> Command/URL (simple)
- make sure Disable is *not* checked
- under Keyboard Shortcut, click on the "none" button & then you can type the
key you want to use as the hotkey (e.g. F11)
- under Command/URL Settings, type in the name of the command to run. YOU
CAN'T provide options to the command so if your command needs options,
you'll have to put them in a script. So, for accents, my command is
/usr/local/bin/KB-INTL where KB-INTL is just this simple script file:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us -variant alt-intl &>/dev/null

and to get the normal keyboard again, the command script is KB_US:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us -variant basic &>/dev/null

- OK, apply all that and then check that the sw that runs hotkeys is running
- personal -> kde components -> service manager
make sure KMilo is checked under Startup Services

with kde 3.4.2 kubuntu systemsettings
- us_intl has been incorporated inside the us file as an "alt-intl" variant AND
in the system settings (the old control center) -> accessibility -> keyboard
layout, you only get to choose one variant. So you can't switch between
them. BLAH. NFG.
- SO.... the easiest thing to do is to map the change-keyboard commands onto
function keys (or any keyboard shortcut you like). The command to set the
accent keyboard is:
/usr/bin/setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us -variant alt-intl
and the one for the regular keyboard is:
/usr/bin/setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us -variant basic
(There's another variant, "intl" which does some (all?) of the accents &
maybe it'll work better than alt-intl, but I haven't tried it yet.)

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Ahh.. SWMBO had some such similar complaint -- it's the new X.org keyboard stuff that's different.

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She wanted to switch between standard and international ("accent keys") layouts on the fly, so we figured out a way to do it. Here's her cookie crumb trail:

My thanks to you and your SWMBO for the cookie crumb trail. Perhaps all I need to do is copy over the dvorak related files from the SuSE machine (I like being able to click the flag icon, since half the time it's my girlfriend that wants to be able to type, and I don't want to make her remember some arcane shortcut). If that fails, I'll be following the cookie crumb trail.

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The U.S.English (us) layout on my machine has a Dvorak "Layout variant" already, so you just need an easy way to switch between it and the regular layout.

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The KDE Control Center --> R&A --> Keyboard Layout menu has a drop-down menu for this purpose, or you could just use a one line shell script similar to SWMBO's to do it, without having to navigate all those menus.

I'll go the latter route, if necessary. I'm trying to find a way to be able to do it via point-n-click, since it's really going to be my girlfriend that needs it most of the time.

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I'm running KDE 3.5, which is newer than the stock Breezy KDE.
You also could upgrade to KDE-3.5 on Breezy, by adding this line to /etc/apt/sources.list: [...]

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If you do upgrade to KDE-3.5, one thing to note is that Kubuntu normally has their *own* menu item for System Settings, which is supposed to replace the KDE Control Center.

Noted. I had noticed that the "Control Center" was a bit different, but wasn't sure if that was just due to a setting I hadn't yet mucked with.

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I only recommend Kubuntu and/or Ubuntu these days. Head and shoulders above most of the crud.

So... I installed Kubuntu (5.10 -- I think that's Breezy Badger) last night.

*sigh*

I hate it already.

Bump.

Well, I got rid of Kubuntu in favour of SuSE 10.0. The install was very nice, but I discovered that a) it had the same issue with the keyboard layouts, and b) it didn't support the suspend/hibernate/standby features on this particular laptop (along with some other features) as well as Kubuntu did. It did, however, configure my pcmcia wireless card during the install, which Kubuntu didn't do.

The not-quite-as-good power features made me go back to Kubuntu. During the install, I got it to configure the wireless card (by the same trick I got SuSE to recognize it), this time. Between that, and figuring out the keyboard thing (use canadian for qwerty, US dvorak for... well... dvorak), and I'm much happier with Kubuntu. It's not quite as fancy, but that's fine.

The only thing I still wish I could adjust (and SuSE didn't provide it, either), is the sensitivity of the touchpad -- it's too sensitive for my taste, and I keep "clicking" by accident. Sometimes, it seems like the thing has a proximity sensor.

Cheers,