RedHat on a Gericom 1st Supersonic
In March 2001 i decided to get a new laptop, after a while i saw the Gericom 1st Supersonic, it seems to be a fast machine for me.

Hardware

Modem

Device	Description
CPU	Intel Pentium III 1000 MHz
Memory	512 MB
Video	Trident Cyberblade i1/DSTN 8MB shared Memory
Harddisk	20 GB EIDE ATA-100
CD/DVD	8xDVD/24xcdrom
PCMCIA	2x PCMCIA Slots
Display	14.1 Inch, 1024x768
Sound	Via 82Cxx
Communication	PCMCIA RealTek8139
Lucent WinModem
Floppy	3,5 Inch Floppy built in

I installed RedHat 7.0 first, all components except the modem where detected by kudzu, the modem works well with ltmodem-driver from Winmodem Driver download site.

The provided kernel sounddriver doesn't work well on the Via-chip, it has a ugly sound and some short hangups while playing mp3's, so i installed the alsa packages, which works fine.

USB worked fine for me, i use a Logitech Mouseman Wheel, the wheel is also supported and works nice on gnome-terminal to scroll up and down.

Xconfiguration works with XFree86 4.x, performance was well for 2D apps, but 3D did not work on linux this time, also the TV-Out was not supported. Watching DVD works well on the internal TFT and the external CRT.

Performance was okay, but the device becomes very hot because of the desktop-cpu used. Sometimes it gets so hot that you can't touch the keyboard.

I updated to RedHat 7.2 without any problems.

I had a lot of trouble with this laptop, after 8 weeks both memory-chips where damaged,i got kernelpanics on login,compiling etc. So i replaced them with 2 spare-parts and upgraded from 256MB to 512 MB, this helped, but i had a lot of abnormal system hangups. Up to 20 times a day the laptop stopped working, with no response from network, no info in the logfiles. I "googled" and discussed it in various newsgroups, but i never found a solution, so i sold it in November 2002 and got my great IBM Thinkpad A21P.

I had also a very long "service experience" what means that i send the notebook to the manufactures servicecenter and had to wait for 2 months for replacing the battery. Next time the needed 10 weeks replacing the CPU-fan and the charging unit.

This was a LITTLE bit annoying me. So the result for is to never buy a laptop from NoName companies without full come-in-support.

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