| Status |
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SUSE x86-64
FreeBSD x86-64 Not configured yet. Mandrake x86
WinXP x86 All devices appear to work. |
| Background |
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The CPU AMD released their Athlon64 in the last half of this year; this is a transition chip using the x86-64 or AMD64 ISA. The Athlon 64 can run a 32-bit kernel with 32-bit userland applications, or a 64-bit kernel with 64-bit and 32-bit userland applications. This means that 32-bit x86 applications will run without modification on either a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel, giving all of the benefits of a 64-bit CPU with none of the porting issues. The Athlon64 boasts features such as a 1 MB L2 cache, and a dual-channel 1.6 GHz replacement for the frontside bus known as HyperTransport. The Athlon64 was initially a desktop and server CPU; recently, however, AMD has released a mobile version known as the Athlon64 Mobile. Clock speeds for the mobile version are 3000+ and 3200+, which apparently cover 1.6GHz and 1.8 GHz of real clock speed. The Laptop At the time of purchase, there were only three options for an x86-64 laptop: the Voodoo Envy, the Hypersonic Aviator, and the Packard Bell Something. The Voodoo gets by far the most coolness points, the Packard Bell the least, with costs scaling appropriotely. The Hypersonic model was chosen since it is based on the same OEM/"whitebox" notebook as the Envy, with several hundred dollars knocked off the price. The Operating Systems The laptop came with Windows XP pre-installed. Due to the inability of the defrag.exe utility to move all files to the beginning of a partition, and due to the tendency of Windows XP to write files in the middle of an empty 60 GB partition, XP had to be reinstalled in order to trim the partition size down to 5 GB. NetBSD gets support for new architectures before any other UNIX; selecting it for install was automatic. FreeBSD 5.1 and 5.2beta both support x86-64. This was an unexpected bonus; if the ACPI support works well and there are no driver issues, this will be quite a nice install. Linux supports x86-64 with late-model 2.4.2x and 2.6.x kernels. SUSE and Mandrake both provide x86-64 distributions, while Debian [the preferred distro] is working on one. SUSE was chosen due to its reputation and to poor experiences with Mandrake. During the course of installation, it was found that many desired features [VMWare, Wifi, Winmodem] were only available in a 32-bit Linux. NetBSD was removed and Mandrake 9.0 [the only 32-bit distro at hand, sadly enough, with a modem for conn] installed. Mandrake 9.0 is an abomination and should be avoided at all costs. |
| Specifications |
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Dimensions
Hardware
Athlon64 Pages
Vendor Pages
Reviews
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| Installation |
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SUSE x86-64 No problems. FreeBSD x86-64 No problems with install, though the 5.2 beta iso was missing Perl and X. NetBSD x86-64 Install overwrote MBR even though it was instructed not to. WinXP No problems. Mandrake x86 Would not boot with the 2.4.19 kernel due to APIC issues. Had to use one of the ALT kernels, a 2.2.19, to boot. This caused serious problems with the installation, since PCMCIA and general laptopness were not detected. NOTE to 32-bit Linux distro users: If the machine locks up and/or the screen locks up during boot, try the "noapic" option or a different install kernel. |
| Hardware Support |
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The first surprise comes after poking around with cpuinfo, then doing a bit
of background research. That Athlon +3200? Yeah, that's got a clock speed
of 1.8 GHz. Now the +3200 designation naturally makes one suspicious, but
the clock speed should at least be over 2 GHz just for modernity's sake. The
real surprise, though, is that the CPU is underclocked to 800 MHz in order
to conserve power.
# set Left-scroll to act like Left-arrow setkeycodes 5a 105 # set Right-scroll to act like Right-arrow setkeycodes 59 106 # set Up-scroll to act like Up-arrow setkeycodes 69 103 # set Down-scroll to act like Down-arrow setkeycodes 68 108
Mandrake x86
FreeBSD x86-64
NetBSD x86-64
WinXP
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| Applications |
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SUSE x86-64
Mandrake x86 Untested FreeBSD x86-64 Untested NetBSD x86-64 Untested WinXP
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| Kernel compiling |
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SUSE x86-64
Mandrake x86
FreeBSD x86-64 Untested. NetBSD x86-64 Untested. |
| Programming |
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SUSE x86-64
FreeBSD x86-64
NetBSD x86-64
WinXP
|
| Third-Party Drivers |
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Linux
NOTE: to build the Atheros driver, use the following command: TARGET=x86_64-elf TOOLPREFIX=/usr/bin/ make TARGET=x86_64-elf TOOLPREFIX=/usr/bin/ make install
FreeBSD
NetBSD
WinXP
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| Config Files |
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SUSE x86-64
FreeBSD x86-64 No files.
Mandrake x86
WinXP No files.
|
| Summary |
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Pros
This really depends on what you plan to do with the machine, and how much you are prepared to be disappointed. The laptop is nice -- *very* nice, with all of the integrated hardware you could want -- but it is big, and the *NIX support for it is limited to, well, this page at the moment. For a Windows user, the question is a no-brainer: 64-bits, all of the hardware works, al of your favorite applications can be installed with no problems. Reviews of the laptop by PC gamers demonstrate awe and joy at the smooth grafics handling, the speed, etc ... in short, for a Windows user, the answer is an unqualified 'yes'. For the Linux user, things are in more of a grey area. Yes, this is 64 bits, and the performance obtained will blow away anything the XP users can achieve. Yes, this is cutting edge technology ... a little too cutting edge. Vendors are still getting the bugs out of a mixed 32/64-bit system, and the ACPI implementation brings to light shortcomings in the 2.4.x ACPI code -- shortcomings in the form of kernel general protection faults. So, for the Linux user, be prepared for a lot of work getting this puppy stable and happy. |