Hello!
I have been trying to get Sabayon CDX on my laptop for a while since Sabayon
CDX 5.4 but the screen goes dead after a while. When I first installed Sabayon
CDX 5.4 I also experienced some issues with graphical installation but all the
new versions that came out and believe me I have tried all that came out since
and each and every time I run into the same issue. So right now I have to
alert you to the sad fact that I have widnows 7 installed on my laptop since I
have not warmed up to any other linux distribution as much as Sabayon CDX in a
while.
MSI EX610 (model no. ms-163d) specs:
* CPU Turion64 X2 AMD Mobile CPU
* OS Windows 7
* Display 15.4 Widescreen Display
* Graphics ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 with 128MB GDDR3 (Support
Hyper Memory)
* Optical DVD Super Multi drive....
Best regards!
________________________________
From: Mitch Harder <[email protected]>
To: Sabayon general development discussions list <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 12:54 AM
Subject: [sabayon-dev] Sabayon on Dell Optiplex 745
I recently bought a used Dell Optiplex 745 on Ebay for $100, and have
been playing around with Sabayon on this machine.
Although I've run into several problems, I don't think anything
reported here is relevant to our release of Sabayon 8. This machine
is 5 years old, and apparently these problems haven't been bothering
too many other people. So I don't think many people are using these
old Dells for Sabayon. :)
First, a summary of the system specs:
Processor:
Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.40GHz (2 cores)
RAM:
1 GB
Graphics Card:
Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Integrated Graphics Controller.
Audio:
Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller
At least I can document a few of the work-arounds in case anybody else
decides to try to press one of these machines into Linux service.
And if we start to run into other people with similar problems, at
least we know I have a machine to test some solutions.
Problem #1) The console goes dead about half-way through the boot
sequence. X11 eventually comes to life, but the display dies when I
try to go to the console.
I've seen some references to this problem on the Internet, but I
haven't resolved it yet.
Problem #2) Sabayon won't recognize any resolutions over 640x480.
While doing some Googling, I have seen several references to this
problem. It seems to stem from Linux's difficulty in probing the
monitor with the integrated graphics card supplied in this machine.
I was able to resolve this problem by populating /etc/X11/xorg.conf
with the monitor settings from another computer that has used the same
monitor.
I noted that Scientific Linux 6.1 handled the monitor resolution fine,
but I haven't dug into why yet.
Problem #3) Our installer won't work in 640x480 resolution. It will
start out OK, but as I advance through the installation screens, the
control buttons eventually disappear off the bottom of the screen.
My resolution here was the same as above. Manually edit xorg.conf to
allow higher resolutions settings, and re-run the installer.
Problem #4) CPU frequency scaling is not working, and this old
dinosaur runs hot!
First, we've dropped support for p4-clockmod. In researching this
problem, I've seen some intermittent claims that the acpi-cpufreq
driver should superceed the p4-clockmod driver. However, I could not
get acpi-cpufreq to work.
After building a kernel with p4-clockmod support, I still had to use a
user-land tool get any progress.
My general impression is that the 2.6.32 kernel from Scientific Linux
is working much cooler than the 3.2.1 kernel I've built, but since
temperature monitoring is not supported, I may have to come up with
some method to support that impression.
Problem #5) Temperature Monitoring isn't working. My Googling seems
to indicate that this controller is not supported in Linux yet (and
since it's 5 years old, it probably never will be at this point).
OK, that's enough for now.
Despite all these problems, I've still managed to get Sabayon up and
running OK, and even though the CPU is old, the twin 3.4GHz processors
still make it feel pretty snappy. So for only $100, it is still kind
of interesting to me. :)
