Distro: Slackware 9.1, custom 2.4.22 kernel
Date: January, 2004
modem (although there is a driver available), acpi suspend/resume
Before installing, turn off Legacy USB Support in the BIOS settings. Installation runs fine from the CD with the default (bare.i) kernel. When prompted, I recommend you actually install the bare.i kernel, because it avoids the problem of PCMCIA hanging on boot.
I'm currently using a Cisco Aironet 350 802.11b pcmcia card, using the Linux PCMCIA drivers. I have also used cisco's drivers, which come with a gui utility program for managing the card. You'll need to have the pcmcia-cs sources available to build the cisco-supplied drivers (which are part proprietary, binary-only, and part open).
Be careful if you share this card with a Windows system. Under Windows, the Cisco driver/utility install upgrades the card firmware to a version that is not compatible with Linux. After you do the Windows setup, you'll have to download firmware from Cisco (probably an older version) that is compatible with both Windows and Linux, and install it using the Aironet Client Utility. Once you do this, you'll be able to use the card under Linux again. I believe there's an option in the Windows install wizard to prevent this from happening, but the documentation words it so awkwardly -- something like 3 or 4 negatives (unchecking disables the default to prevent the firmware from not being upgraded, or something...) -- that I didn't know whether it should be checked or unchecked when I did it.
You're going to have to edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts before plugging the card in. You can see my settings here. (Which I borrowed from this site.) Note that although this laptop does have a parallel port I had to leave IRQ 7 enabled for pcmcia, because the cisco card wants IRQ 7. I'm not using the parallel port anyway and haven't enabled kernel support for it. I don't know what happens using this configuration if you need to use the parallel port.
You should refer to the Linux PCMCIA Information page for more information on getting PCMCIA working.
This laptop does not have APM; it's ACPI-only. You should enable Power Management in the kernel config, disable APM and enable ACPI. If you run KDE, enabling ACPI in the Control Center will give you a battery meter in the panel. There is a good HOWTO on setting up ACPI support here.
X works ok using the vesa driver. This laptop has a Radeon IGP 320 card, which is not supported by the current radeon driver. However, you can get updated radeon drivers from this site, which although it will not enable 3D acceleration, gives much better performance than vesa (good enough to watch dvd's full screen).
Feel free to contact me at theckman@panix.com for comments or more information.