So it came to be. My old laptop (running W98 for convenience) broke from old age and abuse, and I critically needed a new, CHEAP laptop, so I bought this Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro v2030, knowing little of the damnation that awaited me. It came with no OS preinstalled - good thing, since nowadays they usually come with WinXP, which I hate - and 3 CDs in the box. One was the newest version of Nero, one was the driver disk, and one was a DVD labeled 'Knoppix v4.0'. At that time I didn't know what on earth is that, and couldn't be bothered about it. My intention was to install Win98, my OS of choice. After some time I realized that some nasty little capitalist pigs only provided W2k/XP drivers on the driver disk (except for the chipset driver, but that didn't help). The internet didn't help - just made me very sure that very few W98-compatible drivers exist for this machine. I installed what I could find, but then another problem surfaced - W98 couldn't handle the interrupt assignment, and it returned tons of errors about some 'IRQ Holder for something'. The situation was hopeless - I had to install another OS. However, I'd rather die than have Win2k/XP on my own computer, so it wasn't even considered. Then it dawned on me that the third dvd labeled 'Knoppix' might contain something usable. I found some not quite unfamiliar files on it (had RedHat 7.2 some time ago, so I know how do linux files look like), then started it up and decided that it's acceptable. I couldn't download any other distro anyway with my scrawny connection (>1000 hrs anyone?), so it was my ONLY possible choice.

Now a quick summary:
Fujitsu&Siemens Amilo Pro v2030,
running Knoppix 4.0 (debian hdd install),
using KDE,
video: VIA VN800 Unichrome (integrated)


Generally it runs fine - is quite crash-resistant and can do some things that W98 couldn't. However, I have some problems with it:

1. The version of WINE on the DVD was quite outdated. I tried to update it - nope. Now I uninstalled it (uh oh...) - bad move, can't reinstall it (!). When I try to install WINE via Synaptics PkgMgr it tells me that 'these packages have to be removed:' and lists maybe 80% of all installed packages (!), including about 50 beginning with 'kde' (!!!). Using apt-get gets me broken dependencies errors. Any ideas? My idea right now is to download an RPM (but which one???) and alien it, or download a source and compile it (but I'll be damned if I know how though!). And I really need WINE to run various Win apps...
EDIT: Forgot to add one thing: I've tried to install wine as instructed here (as for Dapper), but apt-get hangs when trying to get pkg information from these wine sites (by apt-get update), and Synaptics PkgMgr also gets stuck there.

2. A similar problem with the graphics driver: Knoppix recognizes this video 'card' as 'unknown device'. The resolution, etc is correct, but games and stuff run REAL slow. Using Synaptics PkgMgr to install xserver-unichrome and its dependencies wants me to remove most of the system (!) (see description in 1. ). Using apt-get gives dependencies errors. My idea is also the same as above. Any possibilities here?

Or maybe I'm doing something fundamentally wrong? (and please, don't tell me to fetch a distro meant for hdd install. I have no means to do it in the next week or so, I need this laptop to work on, and I've done too much on this installment anyway.)


EDIT2: I *think* I may be getting somewhere - I have downloaded the wine source and now I'm getting the packages I need to get it compiled and running, but that will take a while (>100megs...)