Sat, 23 Aug 2003

Redhat Severn Beta On Emachines M5310

Redhat released the Severn Beta (9.0.93) about a month ago and I started looking at it last night to see how well it was going to solve some of my laptop woes, most of which stem from the disjointed ACPI support in linux.

The install is reaching a very mature stage, I didn't really have any issues there.

After install, as with Mandrake 9.1, I had to edit the XF86Config for my widescreen monitor which runs at 1280x800. However, I no longer needed to disable the acceleration for the ATI Radeon IGP. Acceleration appears to work across the board.

Unfortunately, ACPI still appears to be very broken. Redhat makes some commentary on the ACPI detection at install time in their beta doc, but it remains a black art as far as I can tell. My box came up with the ACPI daemon installed, but there didn't appear to be any acpi=on line in the grub.conf. In addition, the gnome and KDE batt-stat applets were in various stages of disrepair. The KDE one ran, but didn't see the battery and gave an interesting message saying that ACPI was partially installed. The gnome applet crashed on load, and produced the same results on successive attempts. The lack of ACPI support, at least without a kernel rebuild, means that the machine runs full tilt (read hot) with the fan going, which in turn means that battery life is necessarily short ~ 1 hour.

The new boot graphical boot process is nice-looking, but there must be some technical hurdles to be overcome in the boot. The machine boots into grub with graphics, then goes into text mode for a few seconds, then switches to the graphical boot mode, then goes back into text mode for the login prompt, then switches back into graphical mode as it enters runlevel 5. It would be nice if the boot was unified, more like the mandrake one.

Right now, I've got my USB card reader and PCMCIA orinoco wireless card working. I haven't tried the firewire port but the ohci1394 driver loaded without complaint.

The system does appear to be very stable and the desktop fit and finish is reaching near-Teutonic levels of quality. I'm still hoping for the day when ACPI works fully.

Posted at: 10:02 | permalink