Fedora for AMD64

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 04:30:09PM -0500, Shah Amit wrote:
> 
> Has anyone tried the Fedora Core 1 for Amd64 test1 release for the 64bit 
> AMD processor ?? I have an emachines laptop - 6805 which has the AMD64 ... 
> I want to try to install Fedora on this, but I dont know how good and 
> stable the Fedora AMD64 is ... .If anyone can give me some advise ... If 
> not Fedora, which distro would be the best for the 64 bit AMD ...

We regret to inform you that... Actually, that laptop is full of new and
unseen/tested hardware.  That said, you can make it work, a few notes will
be listed below:

1. You must use a USB keyboard for install (at least until after media
check yes/no screen, keyboard works fine once installed despite kernel
warning)

2. You must boot with acpi=off (While this is a VIA chipset, it is not the
same as the desktop version, I need to add the ID for the IO_APIC
workaround)

3. you will need to download pcmcia-cs and build it yourself until I get
the patches in for the fedora version.

4. You will need to download XFree86 4.3.99.x from xfree86.org and rebuild
from source (untar, make world, make install)

5. You will have to hand generate the XF86Config file, I will post mine and
a brief link to this on the AMD64 FAQ site this week.

The following things will NOT work currently (or I have not gotten them to
myself):

1. The onboard wireless is broadcomm, in 32bit land people are using
driverloader... There is no 64bit windows driver for this, and I do not
know that driverloader has been looked at/thought of 64bit.

2. Power management, yes, this sucks.  Fixing number 2 above should help this,
but for now, expect about 1 hour battery life.  Unfortunately eMachines did
not bother to include any power control capabilities in the bios.  In fact
there is not much at all that is user tweakable in the bios.

3. Card reader.  Might actually work, but I have not tried or seen any
reports yet.

All things considered, I am happy with the laptop, but it is going to take
some time before any distro gives any real "out of the box" Linux
experience.  Note, these issues are isolted to this particular notebook,
and possibly others with the same hardware... this is new stuff, and really
the first time it has been seen (laptop was released Jan 19th).
Unfortunately I do not think that the current Athlon64 laptop vendors have
any interest in Linux testing with their products before release. So when
it ships is when most developers see it for the first time.

Hope this helps,

Justin