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NEC Discovery 713L
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Introduction

     The Discovery 713L is an NEC Australia product only, but it is a re-badged
     FIC Birch-Plus Notebook (thanks to William Y. Jhun wjhun@oswego.edu -- see
     the page for an excellent review):
     http://www.oswego.edu/~wjhun/birchplus.html 
     The link above is so good, it inspired me to share my own experiences.
     
Partition problems

     I tried to use the Caldera eDesktop Partition Magic to make a partition. This
     ended up with a loop between BootMagic and the Windoze "You are inMS-DOS mode....
     Do you want to restart using windows?" and back to BootMagic (Grrr). I eventually
     gave up and decided to reformat the whole hard drive. I probably would have
     kept going if not for the swappable floppy and CD drives on this model. This
     makes it hard for really making great progress as, if you boot off the floppy,
     you have no access to CD.
     
Install from CD

     On the NEC, holding down F2 during resart gets you through to a user-friendly
     bios setup. Under BOOT, change the order so CD comes first then restart with
     a bootable linux intall CD. Caldera eDesktop worked like a breeze in this 
     situation. The sound card driver didn't work, but I imagine I'll be able to 
     fix that now that I have an up-and-running linux laptop. The "bleeding" fonts
     issue mentioned elsewhere showed up during install, but not since.
     
Other issues

     I'll be on the lookout over the next while to see if APM works OK on this model.
     Video drivers seemed not to be an issue at all, and the 800x600 screen setup
     is adequate. As a relative newbie to linux, I was happy to boot off a CD, intall
     and configure setings, then play a pac-man game while the rest of the install
     went ahead. Nice.