Compaq Armada M700

Well, I just bought one for my girlfriend. 500MHz CPU, DVD, ATI Mobility, serial, PS2, 2 PCMCIA, 3-button track-point. I like it a lot. Still HP Omnibook 4150 would be my preferred choice even though both sound support and TV-out favor M700.

Fedora Core 5 installation

Painless. The only minor problem was no control over screen brightness. Here is simple C program that controls it for many Armada notebooks. If you are lazy - you may also want my simple GTK script so you can add it to panel. Installation:

1. gcc m300bl.c -o armada_brightness
2. mv armada_brightness /usr/local/bin/
3. chmod 4755 /usr/local/bin/armada_brightness
4. mv ArmadaBrightness.py /usr/local/bin/ 
5. Run ArmadaBrightness.py - or add it to panel

Red Hat 9 installation

Painless. There only two problems:

I bought it of ebay and HDD had back sectors - Red HAt instalator after detecting bad sectors stops working instead of allowing disabling given partition orits part
It detected 800x600 while screen is 1024x768 - fixed easily by adding 1024x768 to /etc/X11/XF86Config

Tested

sound - works (I need to check full-duplex though)
3rd (middle) track-point button on the notebook - works

Jacek Pliszka

Last modified: Wed May 21 19:34:42 PDT 2003