[ale] eMachines AMD64 notebook

[Jeff Hubbs]

I've been looking at this as well, and here is my reasoning - I'd
appreciate some calibration from you knowledgeable folk.

I need to get a laptop pretty soon for doing consulting work.  I can
expect to be doing OpenOffice and Evolution primarily right off the
bat.  However, I need this laptop to also get me through a Master's
program, and since I will be probably doing GIS-related work, it is
quite possible that I may be doing a LOT of compiling and also, I may
have to slog around a >2GB file every once in a while.  This is what
pushes me into the 64-bit realm and with no small amount of speed to
boot.

It goes without saying that WinXP is going to fly out the window; I'm
putting Linux on whatever I get.

Having said all this, I'm looking at the eMachines M6805 and I'm
thinking out loud:

ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 - Linux-usable?  Closed driver?

1280 x 800 screen - how sucky?  I can dig the aspect ratio, but not
because of DVD-watching - it's more a matter of having things like a
browser window up on one side and an OO window up in the other.

It says "Built-in high-speed wireless networking (802.11g/b-compliant);
integrated 10/100 Ethernet LAN; V.92 high-speed modem" - can I expect
that none of these will necessarily work under Linux?  I do plan to use
the 802.11 part of the time, even if I need to buy a known good PCMCIA
802.11 card.  

"Pointing Device:  Touchpad with vertical scroll zone" - I'm likely to
pick up a real mouse (awesome if there's a way to do that wirelessly)
for my laptop but it'd sure be nice if this functioned, especially the
scroll pad and the tap/double-tap for mouse clicks.

Related questions:

Would I be happier if I got one of the hyperthreading P4s instead, to
include one with better screen resolution even if it's 4:3 ratio?

- Jeff


On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 08:36, Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Brian Stanaland wrote:
> 
> > Just wondering if anyone's put 64-bit Linux on the eMachines M6000 
> > series notebook.  It has the Mobile AMD Athlon? 64-bit 3000+ Mobile 
> > Processor.
> 
> I've not, but several people on the fedora-devel lists are using the fedora 
> test release on them. Sounds mostly supported, but you might want to check 
> the archives for all the gory details
> 
> later,
> chris
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-- 
Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>