So, we picked up an Averatec AV4155-EH1 from Costco the other day.  It's a 4.7 pound laptop with a 13.3" widescreen display and a 1.6GHz AMD Turion 64 processor.  It also has an 80GB hard disk, WiFiG, 512MB RAM, SD/MS card reader, DVD burner, and other usual things.  We got it as a satellite machine.  That is, it isn't a primary machine for either of us.  Rather, it's a nice machine for the couch or Starbucks.

The screen is only 1280x800 resolution, so it doesn't make the best of work machines.  However, for browsing, blogging, or various other light tasks it works great.  In fact, one observation we both agree on is that because it is lower and less work like it's more relaxing to view and use.

Now, the one thing that we've done that is a little difference is to install Fedora Core 5.  Now, Fedora Core 5 just recently came out but with the way Fedora Core works, that doesn't really matter -- it's a continous development project.  In any case, it hasn't been without it's problems.

The first problem was getting the wireless to work.  That was trouble enough that I'll make an exclusive post about it. 

The next problem I've been facing is that there is no trackpad control in Fedora Core 5, natively.  Now, I have found some drivers around that should fix that.  But it would be nice if it was built-in and I'm not really sure why it's not.

The core of a lot of these problems is that Averatec doesn't list the actual hardware used for each piece of equipment that makes up the laptop.  For instance, I don't know if the trackpad is a Synaptics one or what.  Figuring out what the wireless card was also had it's difficulties.  Some others had similars problems and with that I was able to determine what driver to try to use.

Most things just worked, though.  Regular ethernet worked fine.  The screen, the video card, the DVD drive, USB mice, and such all worked fine.   This is also particularly interesting because it's running the x86_64 version of FC5. 

The machine speed is just fine.  It's not terribly fast, but nor is it terribly slow.  Since it doesn't do much of any heavy lifting, it's hard to judge its speed. 

I've installed FC4 and FC5 recently on servers and so I haven't really had a chance to play around with any of the consumer and desktop level software such as OpenOffice.  From what I've seen so far, they'll do just fine.  I'm sure I'll write more about my experiences with them later.

And finally, of course, this post is being written in Firefox on the machine.  Why not, right?  That's what the machine is for, afterall...

Posted by Shane on April 10, 2006 10:42 PM | Permalink