The reason, I’m told by the developers who’ve been directly maintaining it, is that the chips are slightly different and actually require further modifications than just my patch. E.g., register values and addresses have changed.

Again, I’ve been told that 2.6.27 has real, non-hacky support for the wireless card. I’m not going to recommend an upgrade until I’ve tried it for myself, but it’s worth looking into.

(Hint: You might have to switch to a virtual console, via Ctrl-Alt-F1, F2, F3, etc., log in, and execute the command from there. I typically log in on a VC and run “killall esd ; exec chvt 7″ to bring myself back to the X session.)

The bigger problem right now is GTK; if the last session was 10 seconds or less, you might want to check your system clock to make sure it’s accurate.

If libasound2 is already the newest version, try adding “–reinstall” (that’s two minus-signs) to the command-line.

I know it’s been a while since your comment, but hopefully someone else finds this useful.

I didn’t feel like going back and getting it exchanged, so I used vista for a few weeks. What a waste of time. The specs on this laptop aren’t that bad (it’s a Satellite Pro, A215-S747), other than it having an onboard graphics card (kinda sucks for gaming) - but with vista, it may as well have been a super nintendo.

Being fed up, I tried this article (but stuck with debian, I did get direct rendering working but I don’t remember how). It wasn’t very stable at all. So I switched to ubuntu (again following this article). Same thing. X would freeze (randomly), keyboard would lockup, mouse, entire system, etc. It felt like windows, minus the blue screen.

So I tried Slackware (12.1), and wow. Almost everything worked, right out of the box. The only two things I had to configure were 3D acceleration/direct rendering and sound. Those two can be addressed using the steps listed above. I’m using the modified RTL8187 driver and I downloaded the ALSA sources/compiled/installed them.

FN keys work, cpu throttling works, haven’t messed with hibernate (have no reason to, but I’d guess that it works). For the most part, it seems, almost everything works. So just in case anyone would want to try a different distro, Slackware may also be an option for you. Although not as user-friendly as Ubuntu might be, you may find it’s worth it in the long run.

I contemplated writing a how-to describing step by step (kinda how you did), specifically for slackware, but I’m not sure it’s even necessary. If you have a good enough (or even moderate) background with linux - you’ll likely be able to do it on your own pretty easily.

Anyway, thanks again. This was a good starting point.