linux' Firewire support on 8886

I just got in my 8886 this morning (yay!) and tried puttin' Mandrake 9.0 on it (my preferred distro, because 1) it's relatively easy; 2) I'm lazy, and; 3) I'm used to it).
When getting to detecting hardware, however, and loading up the firewire support, the computer hangs, and has to be restarted, with the same result next time you try to auto-install Mandrake.
Apparently, this is a known problem; the board over at www.powernotebooks.com has a message about it ( www.powernotebooks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31 ) along with a suggested remedy.

Just my first try on this. Best of luck to all; I'm loving the Sager and linux!

Mandrake 9 on the sager 8886

So far, I'm pretty darned happy w/ Mandrake 9.0 on the Sager. Because I haven't had a whole lot of time to play with it, and have not networked it to a fast connection yet, I haven't really pushed the machine to any sort of limits. However, I intend to do this, maybe this coming weekend.

Installing the Mandrake 9 was a *little* tricky, merely because I had to do the suggested (in http://www.powernotebooks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31) trick of turning off the autodetect when installing, since the firewire is currently a little obstreperous with linux. So for a few steps, I had to navigate using the Tab key, and arrows, instead of the mouse. Also, I was afraid that the touchpad would never be correctly detected.
I'm not sure whether Mandrake 9 recognizes the Radeon 9000; when looking for video cards, it wanted to use a generic one, rather than the installed Radeon. The one it chose automatically, however, seems to work fine. I'll report back any changes I have to make to this setup. And the mouse was a USB Microsoft Wheel mouse, which was installed just fine. Mandrake told me to run 'sndconfig' when I got into the actual desktop, as apparently it didn't know automatically what to do with the soundcard.
Upon installation, and the concomitant reboot, mouse support was fine, but the touchpad and sound were still absent. I ran 'sndconfig' as root, and that was taken care of. AND, upon logging out of KDE, and back in, the touchpad worked just fine, and continues to do so.

My ONLY complaint thus far with the notebook and linux is that the volume buttons on the cd player do not control sound volume when it's under the control of linux. All of the sound adjustment has to be done via software. However, this is pretty easy!

The notebook is VERY quiet; much more so than I suspected from reading other posts about fan noise. The CD/DVD drives are phenomenally quiet, and fast, and the harddrive is silent. There are no dead pixels (AFAIK so far) on the LCD, and the resolution is *very* nice.

Cheers!
gardyloo