TargaTraveller826

Hardware

This laptop is essentially an MSI Megabook M635, the barebone is MSI's MS-1029. It seems Targa did not bother to change the dmi ids, but bios versions seem to differ a wee bit. I haven't tried using MSI bioses yet. That barebone is probably used in quite a many laptops these days. Targa sells the variations of this barebone under different model numbers and names. The differences are minor:

  • CPU: The barebone can be equipped with virtually any available Socket754 CPU: Mobile Athlon 64, Turion or Sempron.
  • RAM: different models can be equipped with different amounts of RAM.
  • HD: different models can be equipped with differently sized hard disks.

These differences can be neglected from the support point of view. A simple dmidecode will tell you if the laptop is based on the MS-1029 barebone or not. If you are are testing a laptop made from that barebone please contact the maintainers of this page in order to share the effort. For Targa laptops, creating a new wikipage as a simple alias to this page would be a good start.

  • Video: This Laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 chipset. There are issues with x.org's radeon driver, see the bug reports referred to below for details. You might want to use the fglrx drivers. However, using the latter will probably cause Suspend/Hibernate not to work properly anymore. If you want to use the fglrx driver, check out these instructions.

  • Sound: Integrated within the motherboards chipset, works out of the box since Dapper.
  • WLAN: The WLAN NIC uses the Inprocomm IPN2220 chipset. No native Linux drivers are available for that chipset. I successfully got it to work with ndiswrapper on i386. Virus-infected amd64 drivers for windows are available from here. The virus won't affect GNU/Linux systems but beware if you want to use that zipfile with ms windows.

  • Sensors: The various sensors for CPU/HD temperature, fan speed etc. should work out of the box or after installing lm-sensors.
  • Bluethooth: Should work out of the box. See test reports for details.

Tested Versions

  • Gutsy : Gutsy is a big improvement compared to previuously tested versions. Only hardware not working yet is the SD/MMC card reader and the built-in WLAN which needs ndiswrapper anyways. Suspend doesn't work, the laptop fails to wake up again, but otherwise the laptop's perfectly usable. Nearly all of the special keys do work now, as well.

SergioZanchetta/Old/TargaTraveller826 (last edited 2010-02-26 15:19:22 by host226-241-dynamic)