When I bought this laptop at a computer meet it had a 2Gig hard drive and 20 Megs of RAM. I quickly upgraded the Memory to 80 Megs. I would have gone higher if my budget had allowed. A 256M kit was available for about three times what I paid for the laptop.
The vendor had set the laptop up with Win95 and not much else. But this was to be a basic school machine and it was only $135 so, I made do with it. A couple of months later at another meet I found a bargain on a 16Gig HD. About the same time I found out about a new LUG starting in my area. I found Linux.
I started with DragonLinux since I did most of my homework on this box and didn't want to chance messing up the partitions. Based on Slackware, Dragon worked very well and made me want more.
Finaly between semesters I partitioned the HD and chose Red Hat 7.2 to install. It went well, and with an XF86Config file from the web I easily got the X server running. Sound was a simple process of trial and error. I used the sound configuration tool in Red Hat to select the driver for each Soundblaster and went thru the settings until I heard Linus Torvalds voice.
I was quite happy with the setup and much time went by. Then I started hanging out in a coffee bar that had wireless. I managed to trade some equipment for a WiFi card. It worked fine in Windows but was very flaky in RH7.2. So I upgraded to RH7.3.
In Red Hat 7.3 the X server uses the new XF86Config-4 format. All the config files I've seen on the web are for the older version. So I had to figure out what was needed and where it went in the new file. It took a couple of days of reading the man pages, and trying things, and deciphering error logs, but I finaly got X to run the full 800x600 16 bit on the screen.
Now, as to getting better performance from this machine: I'm trying out some smaller footprint desktop environments and applications. I currently have xfde and blackbox installed for testing. Both are working well. I'm also trying out Dillo as a web browser. I'll be loading OpenOffice soon to check it's performance. (a friend with a 233Mhz laptop says it runs fairly well on lower hardware machines)
Since putting this page up almost a year ago I have migrated away from Red Hat. The switch was mainly prompted by Red Hat going commercial. Looking about for a replacement distro I realized that my initial DragonLinux experience gave me a head start on Slackware. The main reason I didn't go with Slack to begin with was the lack of an easy to use package handler. Since then I have found swaret. With basically the same command set as apt-get and others swaret makes system upkeep a snap.
Now for the stuff you probably came here for... getting the xserver to come up on an Armada 4131T.
Starting with the info I gathered from creating the Red Hat versions of XF86Config and XF86Config-4 for this box I was able to tweak the config file that came with the Slackware 9.1 install. I have 800x600x16 as default. For a bit while getting it going, I had the xserver running at a higher resolution with the screen "sliding" to show the desktop, but that was just too weird. I set the resolution and "virtual screen" to 800x600 and left it there.
If I start using an external monitor more I will work on tweaking the config file to allow 1024x768. But until then the current settings work great for me.
As for windows manager and browser, I've settled on blackbox and firefox. I'm still playing around with various mail and news programs. No real front runners in those areas.
The current problem vexing me is wifi. I had great success with an Oronoco silver card, but couldn't get it upgraded to 128 wep using the various firmware fixes I found online. I had to do some trading for an AOpen card with ATMEL chip set. I needed the 128 wep to get online at college. Along with a couple of graphic calculus programs, this has made me keep 900Meg of my 16Gig HD infected with Windows98SE.
Now that I am out of those classes the remaining hurdle to cleansing this box of Windows is the difficulty of getting the ATMEL drivers installed and functioning.
And so the journey continues...
p.s. Copying the X86Config file to xorg.conf works for the new version of X server in Slack 10.*