[ale] Installing Linux on PC

[Jeff Hubbs]

I'd say try the vid out and see how it works.  If it's flaky, can you
disable it and put in a PCI/AGP card in (or just PCI)?

- Jeff

-----Original Message-----
 From: David Heath [mailto:dave at hipgraphics.com]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 1999 12:59 PM
To: Mark Bedish
Cc: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Installing Linux on PC 


>Greetings,
>
>I am hoping for some opinions. I inherited an HP Pavilion 4535 when 
>my woman left and now am hoping I can install Linux on it with a minimum 
>of hassles. The PC itself is a Celeron 400 with 64MB and a 6.4GB HD. 
>My consternation is that the video is of the onboard Intel AGP variety 
>and my only good experiences previously have been with PCI video cards 
>I have purchased knowing before hand they worked with Linux. Has anyone 
>else installed Linux on a similar machine? 
>
>Any thoughts or comments are welcome. 
>
>Thanks,
>Mark
>
>

Hi Mark,

I am running Mandrake 6 on an HP Pavilion 4440. It is a little 
different than the 4535 (AMD K6-2, 4.3GB HD), but I would guess
some of the other hardware is the same. These machines seem to
have every costly corner cut off ;-).

1) This machine has a winmodem, so you must use a PCI or external
modem if you need that. External is probably better because these
machines have so few PCI slots.

2) Video is not well supported by XFree86 3.3.3. It is some SiS chip
and seems cheap/flaky. I was able to get it to work by turning off some
the acceleration features in the Xconfig file. I used the
"SiS 5597" device and added these lines to /usr/lib/X11/XF86Config:
    Option "no_bitblt"
    Option "no_imageblt"


With these options, X works ok, but is quite slow. When I quit
X, then console text is garbled.

-dave