Hi, I start this post since I'm an owner of this Laptop, quite popular between 2006 and 2008 in Europe.
Amilo L7320 was sold with Windows XP Home Edition installed over and because of the next end of XP extended support on April 2014, I've decided on the last october 2013 to try if I could install an Ubuntu version on it.
The things have showed a particular complication, so I hope that this post will be useful for all the people (and also for me!) that will want to install Ubuntu, or one of the Ubuntu-flavours on this not-so-old laptop.
I've decided to do a dual boot with XP, since some programs I need run only on that Operative System.
I've made the first trial with Lubuntu 13.10. With the livecd session all the things seemed ok, so I carried on the installation. During the first boot, Grub was ok, but at a certain point the hard disk stopped and the screen remained dark: a freeze of the system. Since the graphic card is a VIA P4M800 Unichrome S3, I have discovered and I have subscribed this bug on Launchpad. Please, if you have this Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo L7320 subscribe too that bug.
I have described the multiple installation trials I've done in this interesting thread I've subscribed.
From that page onwards I've got from other (super)users newsworthy suggestions and infos on the problems related to this laptop.
At the beginning, I settled with this configuration: Kubuntu 12.04 running Vesa driver. The result was a stable configuration with a poor graphic result: XGA screen resolution instead of a WXGA one (in XP with its VIA driver), faded colours, limited color depth, irregular fonts... for the rest things seemed quite good, but the graphic was a true limit. However, to have a visible desktop on the screen and not a CLI interface, I had to create a xorg.conf file in order to force the loading of the Vesa.
Then, on the mentioned forum, a person suggested to me that the problem could be related to the Enablement Stack or to the CPU's PAE flag, since this laptop has a "Dothan" Celeron M.
So, I've done many other installation's trials (about 14th...), but the graphic result was always the same: vesa driver forced to be loaded by a xorg.conf file created by me.
Another problem I've had is that many installation steps required a continous mouse movement or a continouos pressing 'any key' on the keyboard in order to not freeze the installation: if you don't press or move the mouse, the installation stops and it restarts in any moment pressing any key. This behaviour is occurred in every installation, except the ones made by alternate CD (Ubuntu 12.04) and mini iso, where the interface is made only by text.
After all those installation trials, now I have on that Amilo 7320:
- one partition with XP
- one partition with Bodhi Linux 2.4
- one partition with Xubuntu 12.04
Bodhi 2.4 and Xubuntu 12.04 are the only *Ubuntu versions that work with a correct screen resolution, but sometimes they freeze and you need to hold an "any key" to awaken the OS, specialy when you do the system shutdown.
Indeed the general stability is not so good as I've tested on other computers having the same OSs.
Did someone have same problems I've had? Do you have solved in a different or better way than mine?
Pull out of the drawer your Amilo 7320 and install Ubuntu on it! I wait for your experience...
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