portable, AMD Athlon 64bit processors and 32bit Linux distributions

Hi!
I am wondering, is it possible to install a 32bit linux distribution
(more specifically Mandrake 10.1 Community release) on a laptop with
an AMD Athlon 64bit processor? (the way that the 32bit version of
Windows XP does)
Cheers!

Haven't tried 10.1 Comunnity on my AMD64 laptop because it did so badly on
my other systems but I am running Fedora Core 2 in both it's 32 and 64 bit
incarnations on a Compaq R3000 Athlon 64 notebook.

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, XXXX@XXXXX.COM (Stelios Georgoulas) belched out:

We have a couple of low end AMD64 boxes at work; had no difficulty
installing 32 bit Linux systems on them.

If you're compiling things from scratch, there's some tendancy for
autobuild tools to notice that it's an AMD64 and to try to build in 64
bit mode, but that is typically pretty fixable.
--
output = reverse("gro.mca" "@" "enworbbc")
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxxian.html
"Linux is only free if your time has no value." -- Jamie Zawinski

Athlon 64 chips are fully compatible with 32-bit OS's. Although, I
installed 64-bit SuSE 9.1 on my 3200+ (2GHz) desktop PC.

If you have any other OS you want to keep on the drive, it would be a good
idea to make a note of your original partition data with Linux fdisk, in
case the heads/cylinders end up altered.

> Haven't tried 10.1 Comunnity on my AMD64 laptop because it did so badly on

Hi!
Thank u all for your replies.
Could u tell me what went wrong with Mandrake 10.1 Community? Because
i regarded it as my first (and i thought best) choice. I also
considered Suse 9.1 but in it's personal edition it has very limited
features (not even a gcc compiler i think)
Cheers!

You need to try a couple of distributions and see which works better for
you. I found that 10.0 was very unstable on my AMD64 laptop but that FC2
worked fine. On my old PIII laptop 10.1 doesn't load the ethernet drivers,
MDK 9.2 and FC2 both work. On my old PIII desktop MDK 10.1 seems to be
working OK while FC2 works for most things but has a bug in it's version
of the HP Officejet driver that keeps it from being able to print. I have
another old machine that I'm trying to use as a firewall, Mandrake 10.1
installed OK but the firewall configurator doesn't seem to work properly,
I can talk to other machines from that one but I can't talk to it from
other machines. On the firewall machine FC2 won't boot at all even though
that machine has run everything from Redhat 5.2 to MDK10.1. On my dual
Xeon server FC2 works fine as does MDK 10.0. I upgraded the 10.0
installation on that machine to 10.1 and now it won't boot the new 10.1
(I'm currently using FC2 on that machine, I'll try a clean install of
MDK10.1 later). I've tried Suse 9.1 and hated it because it was painfully
slow compared to every other distribution. Fortunately it doesn't cost
anything to download and try several distributions, one of them will meet
your needs.

You may find some Linux installation reports (either 32bit or 64bit)
at TuxMobil http://tuxmobil.org/cpu_64bit.html

There is also an overview of 64bit distributions.

Werner

--
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|=| <wehe at tuxmobil.org> T. 0049 - (0)30 - 349 53 86
|=| http://TuxMobil.org UniX on Mobile Systems: HOWTOs,Software
|*| This is no time for phony rhetoric -- Lou Reed

On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 11:43:47 -0400, General Schvantzkoph wrote

I just tried MDK 10.1C on my Compaq R3000 AMD64 laptop. It claims to
understand the 1680x1050 screen and the xorg.conf file looks OK but the
actual display size isn't right, i.e. it's stretched and the virtual
display size is larger than the actual display size. Also X freezes after
a few minutes, the OS is still running because I can ssh into the machine
but the mouse is frozen. I had similar behavior with MDK 10.0. Fedora Core
2 works fine on this machine. On FC2 I downloaded the Nvidia drivers from
Nvidia's website and installed them using Nvidia's script. Mandrake
includes the Nvidia drivers, it's possible that they've used an older
buggier version. I also compiled my own kernel for FC2 and I turned off a
couple of optimizations at Win4Lin's suggestion, don't know if that has
anything to do with it. For now the best bet for the Compaq R3000/HP5000z
is to use Fedora Core 2.

General Schvantzkoph < XXXX@XXXXX.COM > writes:

Mon General,

I've been meaning to ask: you have an R3000Z, right? How are you
liking it now that you've been using it for a while?

You mentioned you're using a binary-only X server that's faster than
the free one. If I buy one of those machines, for free-software
reasons I only want to use software that I have source for on it. Do
you have an impression of how much slower the free X server is than
the proprietary one?

It also appears that the 1920x1600 screen is the same size (15.4") as
the 1680x1050, so it doesn't make the box any more physically
cumbersome. It just has more pixels in the same space. Is there
any reason not to go for the higher dpi, i.e. does it slow down X?

Finally, when you're doing stuff that's not CPU intensive, does the
laptop fan run very much, and how loud is it? I find fan noise rather
bothersome.

Thanks much

--Paul

n Sun, 17 Oct 2004 11:21:30 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:


The 1920x1600 is bigger than the 1680x1050, goto Best Buy or somebody
like that and have a look. All of the HP/Compaq laptops have the
exactly the same screen choices and cases, only the motherboards are
different. There is a P4 system, a Centrino system and an Athlon 64
system, all sharing the same form factors.

I like the laptop just fine. However there are still some X issues. No
distribution sets things up correctly, you have to do that yourself. Also
I've yet to get any version of Mandrake to work stably on it, including
10.1C. In theory MDK 10.1C should work because it's using Xorg just like
Fedora Core 2 and 3, both of which work fine, but I haven't been able to
configure a Mandrake system so that X doesn't freeze. Also I don't think
that the trackpad works but that doesn't matter to me, I use and external
mouse. I hate all laptop pointing devices, I always use a mouse. Finally I
just tried to use it to give a presentation and that didn't work, the
mouse was frozen and the on screen view didn't coincide with the
projector. I suspect it's the weird screen size, if it had a normal screen
size then it would probably have been much more projector friendly.

As for using the Nvidia driver, it is noticeable faster than the Xorg
driver, although the Xorg driver is perfectly tolerable. The graphics
chip in this laptop is bottom of the line so it can use the help. The
binary driver issue is going to face you with any laptop you buy. There
are only two sources for decent graphics chips, Nvidia and ATI. Both
provide free binary drivers for Linux that work as well as their Windows
drivers. Installing the Nvidia driver is very easy, I don't have first
hand knowledge of the ATI driver but I suspect that it's fairly easy to
install also. If you are waiting for an accelerated open source driver,
forget it, it's never going to happen. At least the graphics guy's provide
first class drivers for Linux, compare that to the wireless providers who
provide nothing. This laptop uses the Broadcom 54G 802.11G chip which
doesn't have any native Linux driver, binary or otherwise. The XP driver
with Ndiswrapper works quite well. My old laptop had an Linksys 802.11b
card that used the open source Orinoco driver which only works with WEP
off. I'm much happier with the Ndiswrapper + XP driver solution than with
the broken open source driver that was available for my old laptop. In a
perfect world there would be a quality open source Linux driver for
everything, the next best is a quality native binary driver like the
graphics chips have, third best is the wrapper solution and the worst is
having a paritally functional open source driver like the Orinoco driver.

Some final thoughts. This is a heavy laptop. I got it with the 12 cell
battery and a big screen, neither of which was necessary. If I had it to
do over again I'd get it with the 1280x1024 screen and the standard 8 cell
battery, it would be smaller, lighter and there wouldn't be any X
configuration issues. I also would have gotten it with a bigger drive.
I bought the 60G and it's simply not big enough. HP rapes you on the
larger drives but if I had it to do over I would spend the extra $100
on an 80G. As it is I'll probably replace the drive with a 100G drive
some time in the next few months. That's going to cost me more than if
I'd ponyied up for a bigger drive in the first place. The thing that

eneral Schvantzkoph < XXXX@XXXXX.COM > writes:

Hmm, interesting. They have the same 15.4" spec on the web site, but
the aspect ratio in pixels is a little different, so maybe the
1920x1600 has to be wider to have the same diagonal or something.


Yikes, that's pretty weird. Deep down I want to use Debian, but in
reality will probably use FC3.


That's good enough for me, I guess.


What a pain in the neck. I'm just not willing to install a closed
source driver no matter how easy it is. If I want "easy", I'll buy a
Macintosh. I instead run Linux because I want source to everything.

Right now I'm using a Thinkpad A20p which works fine with the XFree86
of the era (pre-Xorg). I don't know if it's accelerated but it's fine
for text editing and ok for stuff like watching mpeg video, though
maybe the cpu load would be lower with acceleration.


Yeah, if HP and IBM are so Linux-friendly, I don't understand why they
won't lean on the stupid peripheral makers to release driver source.
They buy enough stuff that if they decide to use someone else's
peripherals over the issue, NVidia would probably take notice.


I figure WEP is insecure even if enabled, so if I use wireless at all,
it will be through IPSEC or an SSH tunnel or something like that.
Therefore, I don't care about WEP. As far as I know, wireless PC
cards work fine, though I'm not sure which drivers go with which
cards. Right now I'm not using wireless but will probably catch the
wave sooner or later.


Well, in a perfect world there'd be a quality open source Linux driver
for everything, but the next best is to just buy hardware that has driver
source available, and reject hardware that only has closed drivers.
I do know there are wifi cards with Linux driver source, though it's
possible that the drivers can't enable the (to me useless) WEP.


Hmm, interesting. I do like the 1400x1050 on the Thinkpad I'm using now,
and it would be hard to move back to 1280x1024. I don't know if I need
more than 1400x1050 though, at least w/o making the screen a lot bigger.


If 60G isn't enough, 80G or 100G probably isn't enough either. Maybe
you want an external drive. Is there a way of installing a 2nd internal
HDD in the laptop?


100GB drives are around $200 at zipzoomfly.com right now. I've bought
drives from them a few times and they've always shipped fast.


Yes, I'm also eager to run GNU Emacs without the 256 meg (or maybe
it's 512 now) memory limit due to the Lisp type tags.

No comment about the fan noise?

Thanks again

--Paul

There is no way to put in a second drive and an external drive is useless.
When I'm on my network I have access to the storage on all of my machines
but when I travel I don't. 60G is just a little to small. I always have
two / partitions on a machine so I can switch between distrobutions. I
amde them 6G on this system which is just a little on the small size. On
my big machines I always use 8G and that's more than adequate. FC2 takes
5.4G so there isn't much left over. I gave 12G to XP which is part of the
problem. On my old machine, which also had a 60G drive, I only gave 6G to
Win2K. XP is a lot bigger than 2K so I had to give it more space. My /home
has 31G of which 24G is already used. Another 20G and I'd be relatively
comfortable, 100G would be very comfortable. Unfortunately disk drive
progress has come to a near halt in the last two years. If progress had
continued at the old rate we could have 200G laptop drives by now which
would be lovely.



The fan noise isn't bad. Under heavy load you can hear it but it's not
annoying. With regular loads, especially if you run it with the
powersaving governor, it's very quiet.

I beg of you, dear General, tell me what you did to make the touchpad
work? Apologies to the OP for going OT, but I've been flailing for
close to two weeks now. The pad works fine in XP pro so I know the
hardware is good, but in FC2 not a thing. The /dev/input/mice
"funnel" works great with a USB mouse but doesn't respond at all to
inputs from the touchpad. I discovered that enabling /dev/psaux in the
kernel does nothing useful - it's just a phoney-baloney "device"
that's nothing more than another name for /dev/input/mice, presumably
for legacy X conf file compatibility. I also tried turning on pcips2
in the kernel, with no change...right now not even cat /dev/input/mice
shows any activity from the pad.

What's the real device name of the PS/2 mouse port - somehow there
must be a driver interface that attaches to this device and funnels
it, and all other mice-like devices, to /dev/input/mice - so there
must be some way to configure just the PS/2 port? Once I get that
working I know that I can get gpm and X working with the pad
(everything is ready for the synaptics driver, as soon as the pad
actually sends some inputs somewhere).

Back on-topic, I agree that FC2 is a great choice for these machines,
and I will be even more enthusiastic when my touchpad works. Download
& use the nvidia (not nv) driver, as was mentioned. Seems like if you
have a 64-bit processor, why not use a 64-bit OS if it's available?

Thanks
S. Austin
P.S. respond off-list if you like, ignore the spamblocker warning.

Sorry, you misread my post. I said that I wasn't sure if the trackpad
works. I use an external mouse so I assumed that the trackpad not working
was a function of the mouse being plugged in. It's possible that it
doesn't work at all. However I read in the release notes for Mandrake
10.1RC1 a mention of the Synaptics track pad now working. I'm not sure if
10.1RC1 is the release candidate for 10.1 Official or for 10.1 Community.
If it's for 10.1 Official it might be worth giving it a try because it's
newer than 10.1C. As I said in an earlier post Mandrake 10.1C didn't work
for me. However I use the club version of Mandrake which automatically
installs the Nvidia driver. It's possible that Mandrake is using an older
broken version of the Nvidia driver which would explain my problems.
Fedora doesn't include any binary drivers so I installed the Nvidia
drivers directly from the Nvidia website so I have the latest drivers
running under FC2.

That's a good data point for me - perhaps it's a problem with the FC2
distribution, not my inadequate thrashing. In desperation I posted to
a number of laptop/linux/kernel/hardware usenet groups and as yet no
response that anyone has the pad working with FC2.

I'm not suspecting the nvidia driver; like you I installed from their
website, but only after I had brought up X using the default nv
driver. Even then the touchpad wasn't working, in fact when I booted
from the FC2 cd, it made me plug in a mouse to continue the install.

Have you tried doing the website nvidia install on your Mandrake dist
- if they are using an older driver, presumably the web install would
allow you to build over that one?

Thanks
S. Austin