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Sager NP2885 Hardware Report
by : je.saist The Sager NP2885 is a tablet notebook originally designed to run WindowsXP: Tablet Edition. As a Thin and lightweight notebook, the NP2885 does away with onboard items like CD-drives and floppy discs. Unfortunantly, this poses a problem for users looking to upgrade their Operating System. Most *nix based systems have serious issues booting from USB CD-drives on this Sager Tablet. Trust me, I wound up using 6 different USB CD-drives and none would work. However, hope is available. What I wound up doing was installing Mepis to the NP2885's hard-drive... on a normal desktop computer. The tool I used to make this possible came from Kinamax, specifically their Laptop 2.5" to Desktop 3.5" IDE adapter.  More information is recorded in this post on MepisLovers. The quick version of these notes are #1: When booting the Mepis CD, make sure the VESA option is used
#2: Use a resolution of 800*600. Once Mepis is installed to the hard-drive, and up and running on the NP2885, work isn't over. Okay, so with Mepis 6.5 Installed, what exactly do we have anyways? Processor: The processor in this Sager is the 1.6ghz Pentium-M.  Memory Currently the system has a full gig of memory, however 32megs is given to the Intel video.  Network: Mepis 6.5 detected both the wireless, which is connected, and the wired adapter.  Display: Here we can see that the Driver in use is the Mesa DRI Intel driver.  Sound Under sound we can see that Mepis 6.5 found both the modem and the sound card. The sound card, incidentally, is listed as the Realtek ALC200. This is not an Azelia spec sound chip.  USB Once installed Mepis 6.5 had no problems using the USB System. Nor did it have any problems finding the inbuilt camera.  Display If you had not guessed it by now, yes. This laptop is running the Beryl Window Manager. Anyways, we can see the effects of the dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg as we have 3 resolutions available to select in the KDE Controle Module.  As a tablet, the system is supposed to be usable when the Orientation is changed. So, I'm going to go with Right (270 degrees)  yes... it... worked. Somewhat.  A bit of bad news now. The mouse doesn't set itself to the screen's new layout. Also, under Beryl, any of the other rotation options resulted in the X server terminating and restarting. Network One of the major problems on most laptops is the wireless connection. So, here we have the Mepis Network Assistant which shows the settings i use on this laptop.  If you aren't sure about where your wireless connection is located, the Wireless tab will help. Just look for Wireless Interfaces: (location)  On the Interfaces tab we can see where the wireless has connected.  Take me back to the guides. |