So I've been messing around installing all three of these distros on my eMachines M5310 laptop. RH9 (shrike) installs perfectly and my Belkin wireless card loads properly, but I have to disable hardware acceleration in the XF86config. RH9.??? (severn) works fine with everything including acceleration, but its a beta and boots very slowly. Mandrake 9.1 works with acceleration but I cannot get my wireless card to work. When I try to load the atmelwlan driver I get this error message "install: cannot create regular file `/etc/pcmcia/': Is a directory"....

My question is does anybody know what it is in RH9.??? and Mandrake that allows me to use the hardware acceleration and can I upgrade whatever this is in RH9, or can anyone help me install the atmelwlan driver in Mandrake.

Thanks guys.

Check out this link:

http://bugs.xfree86.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314

I have the same laptop and I was able to get acceleration working. I'm not sure completely how all of it works, but from the fps I'm getting I think I don't have direct rendering working. When I have time, I'll look into it.

Anyway, you'll have to download the latest snapshot from xfree86.org. There's a patch for v4.3.99.11, but it's unrelated to the acceleration. You'll get an error when the XF86Config file is read, that's what the patch is for. It just replaces 2 lines.

From what I've gathered, you'll have to download and patch v2.6.0-test4 kernel. I haven't gotten that far yet . . . Time is a premium these days.

As for the wireless, it's a broadcom chipset and I don't think there's support for it yet. This from what a bird told me, so I haven't had a chance to research it myself.

Here's a link from a person who got there m5305 working. From this page, I was able to get video working without major work:

http://home.nc.rr.com/mitchel/Linux-...nes-M5305.html


Anyway, next week I'll get a chance to try to get more time to play with other features.

Good luck,
-laz

you were able to get the onboard wireless to work? what about acpi and power management functions?

From what I've gathered, there's currently no docs on the Broadcom wireless chipset. Unfortunately, it's bad open support from Broadcom. I don't even remember seeing a link to the wireless chipset on their website. Anyway, without docs I guess no one can work on getting functionality.

On the other question, it's half and half. I've been able to see that ACPI is working, but it was on the 2.6 kernel. From my experience I was able to compile and install the kernel, but their are desktop related items are stabilizing. For example, I was able to see that battery state was reported correctly to the task panel applet in gnome, but the trackpad is broken in v2.6.0-test4. Also, it looked like usbmouse.ko and usbkb.ko was out as well. In v2.6.0-test5 USB was now working, battery applet now crashes and trackpad still broken.

IMHO, I think we'll be able to see a good chunk working in the next couple of weeks. It just sucks that I don't think wireless will be working until someone publishes the technical info needed.

As a side note, I was able to watch some DVD's last night. This is my first computer with a DVD player so it was a little bit of a rush. >;0) Crashes on a couple of my DVD's so I'll have to see what's up on Xine's mailing list.