Phoenix is my sister's laptop. This page details everything I know about getting this machine working with Debian (testing).

Installation

I installed from a USB stick, other methods would also work. No problems. All the gory details are in the installation report.

Wireless

It needs the madwifi drivers from non-free.

One weird thing about the wireless is that it doesn't auto-associate with an AP. You can scan for APs, and if you set the ESSID, it will associate. I suppose this is just how madwifi works. I installed network-manager, which does this automatically.

Another weird thing is that the wifi light stays red, rather than turning green. Horrors.

This is a lot better than Windows, which used to work, but somehow broke in the first couple of months my sister used it on the laptop, to the point that it could see wifi networks, but not connect to any of them.

CPU scaling

I installed powernowd, added p4_clockmod, cpufreq_userspace to /etc/modules, and was good to go.

Hibernation

No joy yet, it hangs on resume from sleep to ram, and hangs in the middle of suspend to disk.

Sound

Sound works ok with no configuration, using alsa.

Battery

Don't know how long this lasts (not my laptop). Probably a couple hours.

Modem

Have not tried.

Other hardware

Is there any?