Clevo laptops & Linux

In 2008 I believe I made the worst purchase of my life. Yet.

If you can't be bothered reading, tldr;

A Greek company called "Plaisio" produces the so called "Turbo-X" laptops, which are manufactured by Clevo. The only thing that attracted me to this at the time was it's incredibly low price, compared to the hardware it had. At the time laptops with an nvidia 9xxxGT graphics card, a Core 2 Dual processor and 4 gigs of DDR2 ram would cost more than 1300 euro, but this one cost 700ish.

After I became familiar with Linux, and turned into sort of a linux fanboi, I decided I wanted to install linux on my laptop. The easiest choice at the time was Ubuntu (7.10 or 8.04, can't remember which one).

(Note: I searched on forums even a while ago, and I don't think anybody cared enough to try and install linux on those machines yet).

And so the hazzard began:

1. Booting from a flash drive was never supported by this laptop, up until today. Neither company ever cared to upgrade the BIOS and support USB booting. Only options were DVD drive, network boot and regular HDD boot.
2. Burned ubuntu on a cd, tried to boot from it. No luck. As soon as any graphics (apart from a virtual termianl) was needed, kernel panics. I asked for support from both companies, and they simply claimed their laptops do not support linux, only Windows Vista.
3. Disappointed and with limited knowledge at the point, I decided to give up on the idea of having linux on my laptop. The laptop came with a 1 year warranty, and roughly 20 months after I bought it the screen's "panel" broke, making the laptop unusable and the repair would cost 300 euro. Completely pissed at them for this, I decided to just go for a proper laptop from an actual tech company, such as HP.

A few months ago, I decided to see how this old laptop would now run. Windows Vista took a few minutes to completely start, so I decided to try once again and work my way into installing linux on this laptop I hated so much, because I needed a web server machine (it's specs are way good for a simple webserver). This time I decided to go with my current favourite linux distro, Arch Linux.

Burnt a CD with the < 200 MB archlinux iso, which also has no graphics pre-installed. Everything is done through terminals. This helps a lot in this case, as the graphics seemed to be messing up everything. After I installed everything, I also installed the Open Source nvidia drivers, Nouveau. As soon as I rebooted, kernel panics were happening and there was nothing I could do but re-install (could not chroot either, as something was way messed up).

This time, I decided to take the hard drive off this horrible laptop, and put it on my HP laptop, install everything and put it back into the old laptop.

Everything worked just fine. I installed nvidia's proprietary drivers, I had to do a bit of debugging and regenerate my boot image with some modules that were somehow missing. The laptop uses KDE 4.6, and is completely stable. If only I had known of Arch in 2008 :(

Lesson learned.

tldr; Try to install from command line, and manually install your proprietary vga drivers. If you use the opensource drivers, kernel panics.