Well... it seems that I have done it Debian Etch installed and working on my new laptop. It's pretty great! Works good... now.
There have been a few trials.
1. Audio - I like music, I want music. So when the audio didn't work I was a little bit bummed.
Then suddenly its working... Now it ain't kind of intermittent every time I boot up its a question... "Oh is the sound working?"
Hopefully I can get this nailed down soon!
- Wireless not working - This was a toughy. I initially solved it by following the tutorial here [url=http://www.debiantutorials.org/content/view/153/213/]http://www.debiantutorials.org/content/view/153/213/[/url]
And then undid that fix because I wanted to use the network-manager-gnome package. This started working after I actually read the README.Debian file for network-manager (the daemon, RTFM) and recomiled the kernel for 2.6.20 not exactly sure what made the difference the change the manual suggested or the kernel. But I am currently putting my money on the kernel.
- Fan control - I do not like noisy computers Why all the noise when I am just typing?!?! Driving me crazy luckily I fixed the problem, it seems by "apt-get install powernowd" powernowd couldn't be started for two reasons
- The virtual file system for accessing the cpu wasn't loaded (uh ok) so the README.Debian says you need to add "sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0" to the /etc/fstab file did that. Then I realized the powernow-k8 kernel module wasn't loaded. So I loaded the module with the command modprobe powernow-k8 and then started the powernowd with the command /etc/init.d/powernowd start and finally added this line to the /etc/modules list so that powernow-k8 to the /etc/modules list so it would load in the future at boot up.
And right now I it all seems to be working.