Sony VAIO FX36 Notebook

[Warren Togami]

I got home from the MPLUG seminar on Tuesday night, and my mom totally
surprised me.  She bought two identical Sony VAIO notebooks, one for me
and one for herself.  I'm like WHOA.

$1,499
1GHz Athlon Palomino
512MB SDRAM
DVD and CD/RW
15" really good screen
Windows XP Home

First thing I do is try to install Linux.  Red Hat 7.2 totally wouldn't
recongize the partition format, and Mandrake 8.1 DiskDrake had severe
problems.  Somebody (Sony or Microsoft) took extra lengths to screwing
up the partition table of the VAIO to make it nearly impossible to
install Linux without completely wiping the hard drive first.  Finally
after some FAT32 resizing with diskdrake and parted, I got it mostly
working but it is wasting 60MB of disk space that I cannot seem to
reclaim.  (BTW GNU parted is an awesome tool.)

After installation of Mandrake 8.1, the system wouldn't survive a boot. 
Upgraded my kernel to the latest Mandrake kernel from Cooker and it
boots fine now.  Reading "dmesg" it said something about an Athlon bug
workaround.

So I have a working Mandrake 8.1 system.  I'm very happy now.  I didn't
realize Mandrake uses ALSA by default now, along with numerous other
improvements over the last time I played with Mandrake 8.0.  That
rules.  I have to admit that Mandrake gets lot of stuff right... stuff
that really annoys me about Red Hat.

Some questions...

I want to buy a wireless access point for my house.  Do you folks have
any recommendations?  I was thinking about the Linksys Cable/DSL router
4 port 10/100 switch with wireless AP for about $150 at CompUSA.

Any recommendations for PCMCIA wireless cards?  Should I buy 802.11a now
for forward compatibility, or it costs too much?

Thanks,
Warren Togami
warren at togami.com