Various distributions on the 160 GB version

I bought the 6 cell 160GB black AA1 from J&R last week. I never even booted into XP (so in theory, I'm entitled to a refund--however, as most Linux users know, collecting it requires far more time and energy than I'm willing to spend), and began trying different distributions.
Both Fedora 10 beta (Live CD and installing from that) and Ubuntu Intrepid work fairly well. The webcam works, though I certainly wouldn't say the quality is very good. Sound works out of the box in Ubuntu, but in fairness, in Ubuntu I used Gnome, whereas in Fedora, I went with fluxbox. I got sound to work the way I usually do in Fedora, which has been slighly problematic for non-Gnome users since the decision to tie it into consolekit.

As both use the 2.6.27 kernel, wireless works, but not the LED.

I also tried CentOS, which uses an older kernel. Unfortunately, it seems to coredump when loading the 8169 driver for the ethernet card. (At least, that is the first line of the traceback. Additionally, at first, it core dumped during installation until I used the noprobe option to load no modules. When I then tried to load the 8169 module, it core dumped, so my guess, without any further research, is that the problem is the 8169 driver.)

Lastly, just for fun, I downloaded Linpus Lite from the Linpus site. However, that wouldn't boot from the USB. I may still grab the image made available on these forums and test it if I have some time.

Interestingly enough (again, not well researched, at this point, I'm more or less just playing with it) I grabbed the netbook remix--but for Intrepid, not Hardy. After installing it, wireless no longer worked. I googled for about 1 minute, found nothing, and just reinstalled Intrepid, especially as I didn't really find the Netbook themes all that appealing and Intrepid itself works rather well for my needs.
I know that others have had a lot of success with Mandriva on the SSD versions, but as it's non-trivial, though possible, to install only with USB sticks, I'm not enough of a Mandriva fan to go to the trouble. Basically, I put Fedora on because my job mainly deals with RH and CentOS systems and Ubuntu on because Fedora breaks a lot.

To sum up, either Fedora or Ubuntu are reasonable choices for this version of the AA1. I also put VirtualBox running Windows 2000 on the Fedora installation, and that too works without problems. (I haven't done bridged networking with VBox on it, but don't think it would present any more difficulties than it did on my 4720z which also has the Atheros 5007EG card.)

I suspect that most newer distributions will work and that those with 2.6.26 kernels will also work with the MadWifi drivers. CentOS uses an older kernel, as it's mainly aimed at the sysadmin running servers and the fun stuff in the latest and greatest kernels isn't usually needed. I suspect that if I spent more effort and got it to boot, I could easily get updated 8169 drivers to fix that issue, but haven't yet put my efforts into it.

 

To add to my previous post. The CentOS issue turns out to be due to the included r8169 driver for the wired ethernet. I'll be writing this up on my own pages in the near future. If anyone really needs to know right NOW how to install CentOS on the AA1, just post--in a nutshell, install with the noprobe option, only select the ata_piix driver, blacklist the r8169 driver and get the 8101 driver from Realtek's site.