Initial test of x86_64 on eMachines / Best Buy / Circuit City M6805 notebook

[Mike Larkin]

Updated news....

I repartitioned and booted back into FC1 for an attempt at installing. 
The actual install went ok, aside from the earlier noted problems:
    * must install in text mode
    * integrated kb doesn't work until after the media check dialog

I made an attempt to look through the kudzu / videocard / xserver 
anaconda scripts, but I think the problem with the video card has to do 
with the fact that the "ATI Mobility Radeon M10"  (radeon 9600) is not 
in the PCI device list  .. (??)

In any case, I decided to come back to that problem later and went ahead 
and installed in text mode. When it came time to configure GRUB, it 
failed to detect the existing WinXP partition that I left on the disk, 
so I will have to go back later and edit the grub config by hand. FC1 on 
i386 found the XP partition and added it to the menu.

When the machine rebooted after the install, I noticed a few more rough 
edges:

    1) toshiba_acpi module is loaded by default and complains loudly on 
this laptop. Need to comment this one out, probably.
    2) several error messages about being unable to unmount /initrd just 
before "Welcome to Fedora Core..."
    3) No default XF86Config file was provided - this made configuring X 
a pain since "redhat-config-xfree86" also failed to detect the video 
card properly. I moved a sample XF86Config from another FC1 machine that 
had a similar radeon card installed and edited appropriately.
    4) X starts, but the display is not correct with the radeon driver. 
The VESA driver works and things look correct, but it's AWFUL SLOW. 
(we're talking slow like 386/25 with 2mb ISA VGA card slow). I'm still 
working on getting the radeon driver working.
       4a) X is EXTREMELY slow to start, with either driver. It takes 
almost a minute from the time you type "xinit" until the time you see 
the display. There is periodic disk activity during this time.
       4b) upon exit, the screen flashes red and black annoyingly for 
30+ seconds before you are taken back to the console window.
    5) Sound : works (limited test)
    6) Via Rhine II ethernet card: recognized and configured as eth0, 
but any attempts to send/receive packets results in timeout and 
"spurious 8259a interrupt" messages.
    7) USB: works (limited test with USB 1.1)
   
    Untested:
       Wireless (Broadcom 54g)
       PCMCIA
       Firewire
       Integrated 6-in-1 media reader
       Video out
       Fn Hotkeys ( with the exception of brightness controls, which work )
   

But, the important thing is that it basically works. I think most of the 
items above are related to configuration issues that can probably be solved.

-ml

Brent J. Nordquist wrote:

>On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, Mike Larkin <mlarkin at azathoth.net> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>So far, I'm pretty impressed with the machine. If the types of problems 
>>I'll encounter are limited to those like I've described above, I'll be 
>>happy. Those problems are not really show stoppers in any sense.
>>    
>>
>
>Nifty!  Thanks for the report; I've been curious about those.  Looking 
>forward to hearing "more later".
>
>  
>