Fedora for AMD64

[Mike Larkin]

SuSE 9.0 works much better out of the box, although some of the same 
problems below still apply. With FC1, I tried about a hundred 
combinations of various kernels and ACPI patches and only got a few 
things working. The "development" snapshot of what will end up FC2 won't 
even boot :(

As for SuSE, most of the hardware works, aside from the wireless, Fn 
keys and power management (provided you again use acpi=off).
By the way, SuSE is the only Linux distro that can be installed w/o 
using a USB keyboard. It will complain about not finding a keyboard and 
halt, but there's a install.inf file in /etc that you can Alt-F2 over 
and edit and change Keyboard:0 to Keyboard:1 and then restart Yast... 
(SuSE: off topic for this list, sorry. I'll quit now). It's still a bug 
though.

FWIW,
FreeBSD 5.1/5.2/5.2.1 all fail to boot
NetBSD 11/10/03 snapshot also fails to boot

I was putting together a page detailing my trials & tribulations with 
all these OSes, but the thing got so large with workarounds that I 
decided to redo it.

-ml


Justin M. Forbes wrote:

>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
>
>
>  
>