Right, my Sheeva Plug showed up, I got it setup pretty quick and was using it to remote in from work, and access an HP Pavillion ZV6015us laptop I was trying to get up and running with any version of linux.  I tried many, FreeBSD 7.0, 7.2, 7.3?, DesktopBSD 1.7 1.6?(which unfortunately is based on FreeBSD 7.1 6.2, then Kubuntu 7.10 and 8.04, Slax 6.x, Puppy Linux, might have missed one… all were x64 when available.

ok, so ALL of the Linux versions listed above installed just fine (some took a couple of tries to get the drive partitioning correct, but eventually I got them working…)  the laptop was mostly stock, I had to replace the LCD inverter in it a few years ago to get the display to light up again after it stopped working, I also switched out the stock 5400 rpm 100Gig drive with (at the time the largest) 80 Gig 7200 rpm 2.5″ drive.  The main problem I was having, was getting the audio to work on some, and the wireless to work on all of them.

(the listed attempts below are not necessarily the order I tried them in)

Fedora I tried both the KDE and the Gnome desktop install versions.  I prefer KDE; however in Gnome the wireless and sound was working, but in KDE the wireless would not work.  I tried NDISWrapper, some manually created drivers (someone else’s I’m not THAT good…), and the default drivers.  Fedora Gnome worked fine, but KDE would not.

I tried Ubuntu 7.x, it worked with proprietary drivers installed with no issues, 8.x would not allow me to install the proprietary drivers for the wireless or the ATI onboard video.  Kubuntu did not even detect that I had a wireless adapter. and manually installing the ATI Linux drivers caused so many system problems I reformatted 3 times trying to get them to work.

Puppy Linux worked out of the box with no problems as far as hardware was concerned (it took some finagling to get the audio working), as long as I loaded it into ram, if I did not use the boot parameter “pfix=ram” the system would not display correctly and I would have to manually power off the laptop and restart.  The problem was, I could not get it to install on the Hard Drive, even when following the directions I found online.  The problem I was having was that I could not connect to any wireless network.  Mine and all of my neighbors wireless networks showed up, but I could not get the system to connect to any of them.

Slax also would not install to the HDD, although I managed to get it to install to a VHD.  But I could not get the wireless to work at all, and the video drivers would not install, so any 3D apps would not work either and could crash the system.

FreeBSD – could not get any GUI/WM to load other than XWindows, I spent almost 3 months trying to get this one working.

Desktop BSD – loaded great, but the linux kernel that it uses does not have support for the wireless card chipset.  everything worked great, but I could not get the wireless to work.  This I learned after many google searches was was because the FreeBSD base was older, and the reason this was older, was because FreeBSD made some major changes from 6.2 – 7.x and DesktopBSD had not yet moved on, which they have now, so I may try it again if FreeBSD 8.0 doesn’t suit my fancy!!