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» Number of reviews : 5 - viewing 10 Per Page

Last Review by hw-tph - posted: 08-13-2004 03:29 PM [ Post a Review ] 


Views: 123673

 This laptop really is full featured, and at a good price too. I got mine with 512MB RAM, a 60GB 4200rpm disk and a DVD/CDRW-combo drive. The CPU is a AMD "Athlon XP Mobile 3000+" which is very misleading. It is actually an AMD64 core without 64bit processing disabled and with only 256KB cache, running at 1.6GHz: vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 4 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP Processor 3000+ stepping : 8 cpu MHz : 1595.964 cache size : 256 KB flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 3153.92 I wasn't gunning for pure CPU power though and at the price I got it (in Sweden - it's probably even less expensive in the US) this one is hard to beat considering the amount of features they've wedged into it. I will need Windows for some work stuff so I removed XP home and installed XP Professional on the first partition (about 15GB). I proceeded to grab the latest Gentoo LiveCD, currently 2004.2, and booted. The 1024x768 framebuffer was not a problem since the 1280x800 LCD did a great job of stretching the screen with minimum fuzz. All the functionality needed for installation - network, DMA for disks, and so on - worked out of the box and I had a DHCP lease so that didn't pose a problem. My stage1 installation went fine but during long periods the machine made a whole lot of noise with the fan - not too surprising though, and I won't be compiling or doing other heavy load work all the time so it's not a problem for me. My problems started when I rebooted into my newly built system - the network controller (which is an Realtek 8101, using the 8139too driver module) started timing out on me during big transfers. Restarting networking and removing/inserting the module did nothing and only a reboot would cure the situation. That was a nasty surprise, and things got worse as I also had DMA timeouts which lasted for 10-15 seconds every time and once a minute or so. After doing some reading and discussing with R3000z users I just added "noapic" to the boot parameters and the problems were gone instantly. I have now used it for more than a week without having a single problem. The graphics device is an NV17 - "GeForce 420 Go" with 32MB dedicated memory. It works well with nvidia's own drivers, and to get 1280x800 working properly you need to add a modeline to your X configuration (Monitor section): ModeLine "1280x800" 101.92 1280 1312 1696 1728 800 816 825 841 The only Display section I have (default bit depth is 24) looks like this: Subsection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1280x800" "1024x768" ViewPort 0 0 EndSubsection With this setup and the nvidia module loaded I have no problems with hardware acceleration or anything similar. It works better than I expected. Another quirk with this laptop is that it uses an ALPS touchpad, which was a little tricky to set up. First off, you need to use the Synaptics [2] mouse driver, but you also need to patch your kernel using a file included in the Synaptics distribution. This may be a bit steep for novice Linux users but for most it shouldn't be a problem since the patch applies cleanly against all 2.6 kernels (up to and including the 2.6.7 kernel, at least). You will also need to have tsdev (touchscreen!) and evdev (event interface) support in your kernel, and PS/2 mouse support as a module. I couldn't make the ALPS touchpad work without loading and unloading the psmouse, so if you're rolling your own keep this in mind. There is an traditional init script to load and unload the psmouse module at boot, but in Gentoo just putting "rmmod psmouse; modprobe psmouse" in /etc/conf.d/local.start works well enough (I first load it using the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 config file). Sound works perfectly well using the snd-intel8x0 ALSA module, it didn't give me any trouble at all. Viewing DVD's and writing CD's works perfectly well - as expected. CPU frequenzy scaling works perfectly well using the powernow-k8 feature in the kernel. This helps a ton when you really need to run on batteries. The Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g WLAN module works fine with the evil [3] ndiswrapper [4] software. I would personally love to see a real driver for it but as far as I have understood it is not likely to appear anytime soon, if at all. I now have everything I need working perfectly, and no suspicious errors in my syslog, so I'm happy. I rate it a 7/10 on compatibility, with minus for the tricky ALPS touchpad, the tricky PCMCIA and the non-supported media card reader. Plus for pretty much everything else! What I have yet to try: - PCMCIA. It is rumored to be a little tricky and that you need to load yenta_socket with some memory allocation options but this is outlined on several R3000z pages so it's not something you will have figure out yourself. - Firewire. Need to get some firewire devices first. - The 5-in-1 media card reader. I don't think it is supported at all at this time. References: [1] R3000z (basically the same machine) mailing list: http://quanta.homeip.net/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 [2] Synaptics (and ALPS) touchpad driver: http://w1.894.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/ [3] Why ndiswrapper is evil: http://acx100.sourceforge.net/ndis_cludge.html [4] ndiswrapper project: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ Edit: Of course I meant to say 64bit processing is _disabled_, not enabled. :-o

Rating: 7
Product Details: "nx9105" by hw-tph - posted: 08-12-2004 - Rating: ******** 8.00

Last Review by hw-tph - posted: 05-31-2004 05:11 PM [ Post a Review ] 


Views: 32973

 The sound chip in the Thinkpad 600E is a 4237B and not the 4610/11 as lspci reports. The 4610/11 are PCI chips while the 4237B (also found in a lot of other laptops like the Dell Latitude CPi series) are ISA chips. As gradedcheese notes this card works with the OSS drivers, but the Alsa drivers work even better. The snd-cs4232 driver works but is unstable on the 600E and you should rely on the snd-cs4236 driver instead. Both late 2.4 series with external Alsa and 2.6 series kernels with kernel-supplied Alsa (or external) works well. Add the following to /etc/modules.conf: options snd device_mode=0666 alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4236 alias sound-slot-0 snd-cs4236 options snd-cs4236 port=0x530 cport=0x538 isapnp=0 dma1=1 dma2=0 irq=5 # OSS support alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss ...and that should pretty much be it. Either modprobe the module or use the alsasound script in /etc/init.d, unmute the proper channels and you're on your way to a better living with Alsa.

Rating: 7
Product Details: "Crystal Clear Sound Fusion Audio Acccelerator (CS 4610/11)" by gradedcheese - posted: 11-09-2003 - Rating: ******** 7.67

Last Review by hw-tph - posted: 05-15-2004 06:32 PM [ Post a Review ] 


Views: 39006

 Just a few additions regarding compatibility and usability, a few months later: I run this board now without any problems at all, and I get great performance from it. I no longer use any of Nvidia's binary drivers but rather the forcedeth module (in the main kernel since 2.6.3) for the onboard network controller and ALSA snd-intel8x0 for sound. Works a treat for me (use alsaconf to have the module options setup automatically). I also recently switched from using the regular kernel sil3112 driver to the libata (quasi-SCSI). libata works really well and I get about 53MB/s throughput on my Seagate SATA disk. My other disk, a regular PATA Seagate, is still /dev/hda and works fine using the amd74xx/nforce IDE option in the kernel. There is really no reason not to buy this board if you're going for an Athlon XP-based setup.
Product Details: "NF7 with sound" by dalek - posted: 11-10-2003 - Rating: ******** 7.80

Last Review by hw-tph - posted: 12-01-2003 02:05 PM [ Post a Review ] 


Views: 39006

 First off, this is a review of the NF7-S revision 2 board. First, some of the features: nVidia nForce2 chipset with the full audio setup, SATA, IEEE1394 (Firewire) and Ethernet. The SATA controller is a Silicon Image 3112A chip, which is supported in the 2.4.22 and later 2.4 series kernels, and it is also supported in the 2.6 series. If you install a distribution that lacks SATA support you will have to install on a traditional (parallell) IDE controller and then build a kernel with SI3112A support and move it over to the SATA drive by whichever means you prefer. The support for SATA and nVidia IDE is pretty poor in the kernel. Sure it works, but SATA and traditional IDE performance on my NF7-S with a Barton 2800+ CPU is on par with the 5400rpm drive in my 366MHz laptop! hdparm -T, no matter what settings I use (and believe me, I have tried *many*) reports transfer speeds of about 26MB/s. In comparison, my old Asus A7V (950MHz Athlon) with the Promise 20265 ATA100 controller, produces 59MB/s with the same disk! So the nVidia IDE and SiliconImage kernel drivers still has lots of room for improvement. Onboard sound and Ethernet is provided through the nForce2 chipset. These do not work straight out of the box since there are no stable open source drivers for them yet (there is an experimental network driver though), so you will have to get the drivers from nVidia's driver page or FTP server by some other means (hey, got a spare network card lying around?) and then install it. The nVidia drivers work well. I usually compile my own kernels and I have never had any problems building the .tar.gz-packaged driver modules against my own kernel source tree. After making the drivers, a simple modprobe for each driver will bring both Ethernet and audio online. The last time I downloaded and installed the drivers they had a new and simplified (automated) installation which should please most users. I have not yet tested more than two speakers with the nVidia Linux drivers, but I have heard it works. Don't take my word for it though. Network performance is excellent with the nVidia drivers. I can fully saturate my 100MBit home network without much effort, and CPU usage is not as high as with many other cards. IEEE1394 appears to work OK, but since I don't have any Firewire devices I cannot verify this. Final words: Very disappointing disk performance in Linux, but hopefully this will improve with updated drivers. Excellent integrated network controller, and pretty good audio. If you use Gentoo you should have no problems installing Linux on a SATA disk since you build your own kernel during the installation process. Just don't use the generic Gentoo kernel sources since they are at 2.4.20 at this time and do NOT support the Silicon Image controlle.

Rating: 3
Product Details: "NF7 with sound" by dalek - posted: 11-10-2003 - Rating: ******** 7.80

Last Review by hw-tph - posted: 12-01-2003 01:26 PM [ Post a Review ] 


Views: 16951

 Works very well with Linux kernels 2.4.22 and onwards. I access it like a SCSI disk (/dev/sda1) and I have no problems whatsoever with it. On an amusing note, file transfer to and from the camera is faster in Linux than in Windows.

Rating: 8
Product Details: "Cyber-shot DSC-P8" by hw-tph - posted: 12-01-2003 - Rating: ********* 9.00



  



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