Mandrake 8.1 on a laptop

Wahoo! I have finally got Mandrake Linux to work on my laptop (a generic thing from Atlas)

For the last 4 months I have tried to get Mandrake 8.1 to work on my laptop without the “drizzle” or “burning” which the standard drivers usually give under KDE. The key was Thomas Winischhofer’s work on developing decent driver for the SIS 630 family of integrated video chips. I cannot recommend this highly enough. If you have laptop with a SIS integrated video card you will have to visit his site – I don’t know of any other way you’ll get Linux to work.

After figuring out that Mandrake only ships with XFree86 3.3.6 (what were they thinking?) I installed the binary version of XFree86 4.1, copied in the driver from Thomas, copied his config file, typed startx and a perfect KDE desktop appeared for the first time. Sweet.

I’m not a demanding Linux user (no need for sound, modem or 3D graphics) and so far everything seems to be going fine. Finally, I’ll be able to play with Linux and all the cool little programming languages found there