FC2 and 64-bit Notebook -- problems

[Cilibrin]

Okay, I'm a little frustrated. I love my new notebook. It's an eMachines M6810, Athlon 3200+ 64-bit processor, 512 ram, ATI Radeon, yadda yadda).

It came preinstalled with what else but XP home, and I actually need to keep XP on it to run some important business software. Still, I want to run Linux on a partition; I need my Linux fix, and I'm embarassed that my friends will see me running XP or that someone on the train will see me using XP.

Anyway, I use FC2 on four boxes at home. I partitioned my notebook and put the 64-bit version of FC2 on my notebook, and the performance of the system fell to almost 0 -- programs took forever to open, the mouse was jerky; the os gave me no option to set my monitor at native resolution of 1280x800. I removed FC2 and the Linux partitions.

BUT, I can't stand not having Linux on this box. I'm willing to give FC2 another try.

Does anyone know of FC2 being buggy with my notebook configs? Any ideas why it's incredibly slow? Any ideas about changing the resolution? Any suggestions on another distro if FC2 won't work?

Thanks.

[fjleal]

I'd try the live CD distros, like Knoppix or LiveSlack, both to test the hardware for incompatibility issues and to check if the source of the problem is FC2.

[Bana]

I believe that the emachinel laptop(s?) are slightly... erratic with Fedora. Let us use the words of others:

How do I make my eMachines m680x work with Fedora Core 2?
Unfortunately these machines do not work "out of the box" I am happy to report that Chris Kloiber has created a nice page on setting these laptops up I am currently using his kernel with success. You will want to make sure that yum updates are done with '--exclude kernel*' to avoid reverting to a non functional kernel.

(that was from http://www.linuxtx.org/amd64faq.html ) and thus you can go Here: http://www.ckloiber.com/ to figure it all out HTH

[Bana]

Looks like there is something up, read this from Chris's website:

* Sat Jul 17 2004 Chris Kloiber <ckloiber at ckloiber dot com>
- STOP THE PRESSES! BIG NEWS! I am out of the custom-kernel business!
- Go to http://www.rmecc.com/~v2/em/index.html (thanks to Geoff K. Hart and Google Web-Alerts) and get the (unofficial) M6809 bios, then flash it. You won't need a USB keyboard to install anymore, and you won't need any install or boot time kernel options. Your screen will darken some when booting, but with Fedora you can increase the brightness again using <Fn-F8>. I suspect this is ACPI related, but minor. I think that with some poking and prodding in /proc/sys we may come up with a way to have the OS return the screen to full brightness... We shall see.
- I have also successfully installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 AS for x86_64 on my M6807. It's fully functional as well, however the screen can't be made bright with the <Fn-F8> key. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 kernels do not attempt to support ACPI, so I don't see this working until Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (or whatever Red Hat decides to call it) is released.
- I received an email from "Jae" telling me how he has had great success with an XG600 Wireless-G Mini-PCI card from Xterasys (~US$45 at GoGoCity.com). Just copy the necessary firmware file from either the Windows driver CD or from http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/ and copy it to /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/isl3890. Since this is a firmware image uploaded into the card, and not a driver for Sindows, (a "Freudian" typo) this combination works well with Fedora and x86_64 kernels. I bought myself one and it works great.
- BTW, The anaconda installer from recent rawhide dvd isos I create with my FedoraSync.sh script can correctly detect the Radeon 9600 Mobility M10, but not the screen timings. Still need to muck with those a bit.