I'm think about getting an Athlon64 laptop. Has anyone had any success putting Linux on one? If so, what brand and model?

Nate

Well I don't have an Athlon 64 laptop but I'm thinking pretty hard about the E-machines Athlon64 notebook. A few months ago I would have laughed at anyone buying an e-machines product but I bought the M5310 laptop at the end of the summer and am blown away by the price and performance. They put a really nice package together for the price of them system.

What other Athlon 64 notebooks have you seen for sale?

The e-machines M6805 and the M6807 ---- http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....3&type=product

The voodoo m:855 --- http://www.voodoopc.com/default.aspx

The hypersonic Aviator AX6 ---http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/AX6/index.asp

The voodoo and Aviator are pretty expensive, but they have 128MB of graphics memory compared to 64MB on emachine.

Nate

Oh man - you had to post that links?Now I got to go and buy a new laptop.Anyway - Suse got a 64 bit version and gentoo is screwing around with one.You could try the gentoo forums.They got a bunch of threads about it.I'd be concerned about the graphics driver.Nvidia has a 64 bit version - dunno if the ati drivers work with a 64 bit CPU.

I've not looked into A64 lappies, but let's get this straight for my benefit. You can buy a 64bit laptop that is sold with a 32bit version of Windows XP on it? Have the suppliers not thought that perhaps that negates the point of a 64bit machine? Man is that the stupidest thing I've heard lately! Anyway, I've read a few reviews before now and it would seem that SuSE 64 is nicely tuned for the 64bit environment, except for the database engine which lags... but would you be doing that with a lappy? Apparently RedHat beats it slightly, though.

£0.02

That might be the point of putting Linux on it.Plus a AMD 64 blows a pentium away no matter if it runs 32 or 64 bit.

You can blame the 32bit OS thing on Microsoft because they keep delaying the release of the OS. Of course it really works out fine for us since we use Linux anyway and don't have to wait for Microsoft to get off their butts and ship the product. I think Intel's hand is in this somewhere myself.

I just bought the M5310 laptop in August. I was going to wait for the 64 version but I didn't have the time as I needed it for school. Now I'm thinking about handing my M5310 to my folks and buying the 64 bit one in the summer...

I just got my M6805 and even if this were a 32-bit only CPU the machine is worth the price IMO. I'm currently dual booting XP Pro with Fedora Core 1. My only complaint is that it's got a slow hard drive.

I downloaded knoppix and burned it to a CD. I took the CD to the nearest best buy and did a little laptop test driving. Knoppix is really amazing. The AMD64 E-machine laptop hung at boot up. An AMD 2800+ compaq laptop completely configure and ran fine. I tried one of the wide screen HP's, It booted and ran -- the shutdown didn't go smoothly. Knoppix ran on a AMD64 emachines desktop just fine. Knoppix is a great tools to take to the store to test out laptops or desktops for linux compatibility. Way cool.

Later,
Nate

You need to use the failsave option to boot the emachines laptop.Then it works fine without 3d though.