After having a Compaq Presario for about a week I got quite sick of the unreliable ethernet interface (it's ok, but it would drop out every 4 hours or something, which isn't so good when you do all your work on a network), so I traded it up for a Compaq Evo N160. It's a great little machine, I'm thrilled with it. This is just some quick notes on stuff I thought might be helpful to others thinking of buying one of them.
The TV-out does work, but don't buy one of the svideo to RCA cables that has svideo on one end and two RCA plugs on the other end. I got one of these and the best you'll do with such a cable is a black and white picture. I tried all sorts of shops to get one of these, I really do avoid just avoiding all the time you'll waste trying to find one of these cables in Sydney and getting one from svideotorca.com. These guys specialise in the cables, are prompt with delivery and they will just work, straight out of the box. You won't get the TV-out working with Linux just yet, so I recommend keeping a small win2k partition for watching DVDs and such.
Linux works really nicely on these machines. I recommend Mandrake for them for the simple reason that it's installer will resize the Windows partition that it ships with so you can still have TV-out loving with a minimum of fuss. X works straight out of the box. It's very good in 2D, but the ATI Radeon card just doesn't cut it on 3D. The sound is excellent, it has a minor problem when you route the pc speaker though it in that you get a nasty hum sound, but turning that off in the mixer will give you really good audio. The modem install couldn't be easier. You get the driver files from Lucent, install them and you'll get another tty device in /dev. Just like that. Sorry, I don't have a link for that.
The ethernet card doesn't come with the standard linux kernel. Mandrake build it in, but if you aren't running Mandrake then you'll need to grab the driver from Intel. Like the modem, it just works.
The "internet zone" keys can be made to work. You need to put this:
Option "XkbModel" "compaq"
In your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file. They will then generate scan
codes but you'll need to use Xmodmap to map the scancodes to usable symbols.
You can then use your window manager to ascribe functions to the keys. Window
Maker has a nice dock app called "WMix" which does volume stuff with a cute on
screen display.
I've not been able to get battery status from ACPI. ACPI can now tell me when I have th power cable plugged in, can generate events when the lid is closed etc and can tell me the temperature of the CPU (supposedly, it looks a bit high to be reasonable). The machine does not support APM, so there's no way you can work around this. Hopefully this is fixed in the new 2.4.19 kernel.
Set DHCP_TIMEOUT=5 in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 if you don't have your computer connected to a network all the time (Mandrake 8.2 upwards only). That means it won't stall for a minute when booting disconnected.
Last update: 20/8/2002