Linux and other annoyances with the Compaq Armada M700

My Compaq Armada arrived Friday, over the weekend I have tinkered with it a bit, and got a dual-boot set up.

For starters the specs are:
Intel Pentium !!! Processor @ 700Mhz
320MB RAM (came with 192MB)
ATi RAGE Mobility M1 graphics with 8MB graphics memory
8x DVD-ROM drive
ESS Maestro sound card
Intel PRO/100 Ethernet
Lucent v.90 Winmodem
30GB PATA hard drive (came with 12GB)

The first annoyance was that the 256MB stick of RAM I got on eBay did not work with this machine. I was a little surprised to see that it had a 128MB stick of RAM in it (not a 64MB). It has 64MB RAM on the motherboard, and the eBay listing said it has 128MB. I tossed in a spare 128MB stick out of an old Dell that I had laying around and it worked just fine.

The next annoyances are quite minor. One is that the listing said that it had a DVD-ROM/ CD-RW combo drive, however it is just a plain 'ol DVD-ROM. The other foiled my plan to tote several hard dives with me with a different OS on each. This was foiled because the hard drive caddy is a real PITA to swap drives in. One Torx screw to remove the caddy, and 6 Philips to remove the hard drive from it, not to mention the whole thing falls into about 5 pieces after you remove all the screws.

Back to the problem RAM: in my fiddling with it, I though that there was a problem with the DVD drive as it was only half-loading OSes from boot CDs (I tried Windows 2000, Windows ME, and a special DOS one). I went through and swapped out the CD-ROM in its caddy (it has a modular bay) only to come across the error "Invalid Memory Module Installed!!!" I couldn't get this error to go away, even with the hard drive, battery, optical drive, and all RAM removed. I found out that there is a hidden key combination (Fn + F11) that will reset the CMOS and usually overcome this error. Thankfully for me it fixed it. I put in the original 128MB stick of RAM, and another one, then original DVD drive, the hard drive and finally the battery.

Onto installing Windows. Since I was limited to one 30GB hard drive, and 320MB of RAM I decided to go with Windows 2000 instead of Windows XP. This gives me almost all the needed compatibility with smaller RAM and hard drive usage. The compatibility issues I have with Windows 2000 are with an older game (refuses to install on Windows NT, however can be overcome by Windows XP's compatibility wizard), and the latest versions of my security software. I was able to find alternates to them, so that is no big deal, either.

The install of Windows 2000 went without problem, HP has all the drivers and extra software for all version of this laptop series on its website, and Window Update gave me some newer versions.

On to Linux. Since this is an older laptop with less than 384MB RAM my favorite version won't work very well with it (Ubuntu). There is an official Ubuntu derivative, Xubuntu, that is designed for older systems that don't have as many resources, so I decided to use that.

The problem was that the CD wouldn't boot.

Having a similar issue with some Acer laptops I gave it the ACPI=OFF option, and it booted. while it was installing I did some research online and found out that ACPI wasn't the problem, it was the radio_maestro module in version 9.04. If I have to re-install in the future for any reason I now know that I can use the alternate install CD with no problems, however I will still have to access it from some other way to blacklist the file, but should be no problem now that I have done it once.

Why it booted, I have no idea, and as I suspected, after trying to boot from the hard drive it froze up on me.

I had blacklisted modules before, but only from within a booting OS. A forum thread I found online talked about using an older version's live CD and editing the file from that, however that would require me do download one as I didn't have one with me. I though to myself there must be a simple solution... There was: Windows 2000 worked perfectly. All I had to do was fine a driver to access the ext3 file system with read/write access and edit it from there. I ended up using Ext2FSD (http://www.ext2fsd.com/), modified the file, saved it, rebooted, and bingo, there it was staring me right in the harry eyeball - the Xubuntu Desktop.

A quick edit to the GRUB menu to enable ACPI, a reboot to test, and I was good to go. Updates installed, ndiswrapper and drivers for my Airnet AWN154 PCMCIA wireless card and I was well on my way to getting it going.

My To Do list is:

• Get the Lucent Winmodem set up for use in Xubuntu
• Get the official built of Firefox installed in Xubuntu via Ubuntuzilla
• Install multimedia codecs in Xubuntu
• Install the latest version of OpenOffice.org for Xubuntu.
  
• Customize and install any other wanted programs for both OSes.

All in all, my experiences with this laptop would baffle a Linux n00b, however an amateur should have little difficulty. I consider myself to be slightly above an amateur with Linux, however I am rapidly learning more and more about it.