-the Alps trackpad sensitivity is very low, and movement is jittery. I installed gsynaptics-pointing-devices, but no change.
-though it seems that ALSA is seeing my sound card and loading the drivers, whenever I try to play audio, it will play a tiny bit, then the program will stop responding. I've tried cd's, Youtube vids, (the video will play, but no audio), and streaming flash players. This problem doesn't occur in WinXP.
-My external usb drive with Isadora Fluxbox won't boot from bios. (It will boot, fully functional, from my other laptop, a Compaq Evo N610.) I can mount the partitions from my XFCE install, and after doing a "update-grub", I can sometimes boot from the internal hd's grub, but the login screen has graphical glitches, and audio is similarly non-functional. Both installs use the same 2.6.37 kernel and xorg-edgers PPA.
I have "noapic" in my boot configurations, to avoid the whole system freezing up, but was wondering if I need to modify this command to improve sound and trackpad handling.
According to my research, my sound card, (ATI IXP), should be well-supported in Linux. XFCE w/Compiz works fine. I've updated the Phoenix bios to version f.45. The power supply the computer came with is a replacement; 18.5v, 6.5a, but the specs on the HP website said max operating voltage is 10a. Not sure if this is a problem; I couldn't find the specs for the original power supply.
Does this sound like a bios or motherboard compatibility issue, or a power issue, or something else? If I can't sort it out, I think I'll have to wipe Linux from this machine and sell it. Please help?
edit: I just booted Crunchbang Statler on a USB stick, and I was able to play cd's and audio in Youtube works. (Flash audio still didn't work and the trackpad is still jittery, and the system becomes unresponsive for a few seconds every minute or so. I didn't add "noapic" to this particular install.) Why is it working in #! but not Mint?
