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@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".
What is the chipset on this laptop? If it is NForce 3 are you booting with acpi-off? That may take care of some of your issues, particularly network. But of course you would lose your power management.
Justin
It's a VIA chipset. Sadly, lspci and scanpci both return "unknown device" for the southbridge, but it is definitely VIA-made.
I took your advice and ran w/o ACPI and it did resolve the network issue. Is this a known problem with x86_64 ? I didn't see that written up anywhere. (Check all the READMEs I could find).
Things are looking a little better now.. I've been able to get more hardware working today. I did find that the pcmcia-utils package wasn't included (intentionally or unintentionally), so picking that package up from sourceforge and rebuilding seemed to bring PCMCIA online fine. I was also able to fix the SLOW video problem I earlier saw. Suffice to say, I saw the same slowdown in windows after playing some DirectX games, so perhaps it's an ATI issue if the card is not reset properly. Rebooting the machine fixed the problem.
I'm rebuilding XFree86 now from the latest development snapshot, so we'll see if that fixes the radeon driver problem. (Crosses fingers..)
-ml
Justin M. Forbes wrote:
What is the chipset on this laptop? If it is NForce 3 are you booting with acpi-off? That may take care of some of your issues, particularly network. But of course you would lose your power management.
Justin
On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 04:05, Mike Larkin wrote: [SNIP]
I'm rebuilding XFree86 now from the latest development snapshot, so we'll see if that fixes the radeon driver problem. (Crosses fingers..)
We have several machines with Radeon 9800 Pro cards in them. There have been some issues with XFree86 4.3 though I can not remember what exactly they were (though "slowdown" sounds familiar).
One of my co-workers downloaded, built and tested an XFree86 4.4 development snapshot recently. He said the issues found under 4.3 were all gone.
HTH. Good luck.
Yes, I found the same thing. I downloaded 4.3.99.902 and the problems were fixed.
Actually, I got most of the features of the laptop working. If anyone is interested in a write-up, I'll put together a page and link to linux-laptop.net.
FYI - FreeBSD 5.2 and NetBSD 11/03 snapshot won't boot at all.
-ml
Lamont R. Peterson wrote:
On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 04:05, Mike Larkin wrote: [SNIP]
I'm rebuilding XFree86 now from the latest development snapshot, so we'll see if that fixes the radeon driver problem. (Crosses fingers..)
We have several machines with Radeon 9800 Pro cards in them. There have been some issues with XFree86 4.3 though I can not remember what exactly they were (though "slowdown" sounds familiar).
One of my co-workers downloaded, built and tested an XFree86 4.4 development snapshot recently. He said the issues found under 4.3 were all gone.
HTH. Good luck.
On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 01:12:06AM -0800, Mike Larkin wrote:
Yes, I found the same thing. I downloaded 4.3.99.902 and the problems were fixed.
Actually, I got most of the features of the laptop working. If anyone is interested in a write-up, I'll put together a page and link to linux-laptop.net.
If you have a write up, let me know, and I will link to it in the AMD64 FAQ. It seems there is a good bit of interest in this laptop now.
Justin
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Justin M. Forbes -
Lamont R. Peterson -
Mike Larkin