Ok so I have this nice AMD Athlon 64 Compaq R4000 laptop. It has 512 RAM an 80GB Drive (4200 rpm yuck) it runs xp great but i would like to get a nice Linux Distro thats 64 bit and will run on this hard ware.
So far I have tried Unbuntu, SUSE, FreeBSD (not linux but i gave it a shot) Debian and a few others.
I cant get any of them to install. The fursthest I can get is with SUSE 9.1 DVD install I can to the disk tool and the install craps out trying to build my partitions.
Most of the other distros dont even start their various install programs.
The SUSE Live CD will however boot and run fine on my machine. I have been unable to mount the ext parition on the hard drive while booted into the live CD.
Also Knopix will boot and give me access to the hard drive and the network.
So I have played with the idea of running knopix from a cd but I feel confined by that solution.

Has anyone had any success installing a linux distro on the R4000 series AMD 64 laptops?
If so can you point me toward the distro you used succesfully?
I have read that someone got Gentoo to run on a laptop like mine but have not had the same success and havent found much in the way of info on how it was done.
My experience level with linux is as an Admin on Redhat servers. I add users, crete mail accounts and distros, configure Samba, veritas, apache site setups and authentication, FTP account management and all those good things. I have never run into an issue installing Redhat untill I tried to put Fedora Core on this laptop. I have installed SUSE, Redhat, Mandrake, Skackware and Fedora in the past all sucesfully on desktop and server hard wares and a few older laptops.
So I am not a beginner but also am not an expert and have little experience with distro that dont have a full install wizard.

thanks
brady

I have the hp zv6000 which is essentially the same hardware as the r4000. I'm running FC 4 and that seems to be the best distro for this laptop. The problems you might face is configuring the ATI card which is a pain. There are some threads on this in this forum which will point you in the right direction. While installing, pass the option 'nofb' -- no frame buffer. Else the screen might lock up on start. I have read that someone got Mandriva 2006 beta working on this but I haven't tried it yet. I also recommend that you first create the required partitions if you're going for a dual boot. The disk partitioning tool on FC 4 doesn't allow creation of partitions. If it does then I couldn't find it and was a frusterated with it. Let me know if you run into any problems.

Regards,

thanks for the info

I'm running Ubuntu, Xandros 3 and Win XP on a Compaq Presario R3000 AMD 64 laptop with no real problems. I hope to load Suse 9 and possibly a BSD too - just to see if I can.

well suse would be my prefered distro at this point but i have had no luck with its install wizard. It seems to stop responding while tryign to mount partitions. It also likes to make a bunch of extened partitions which I dont like at all.

maybe my partition scheme is hurting me

i have


/dev/hda1 ntfs
/dev/hda2 /boot
/dev/hda3 swap
/dev/hda4 /


grub is loaded on boot and currently gentoo is on hda4 so i can boot into windows but have not succeded in booting gentoo yet however now I get a group error that says cant find the file so hopefully its just the pointer in grub is wrong

i have the following in grub.conf
wonder if this is correct for my partitioning


default 0
timeout 30

splashimage (hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.12

root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-2.6.12-gentoo-r9 root=/dev/hda4



title=The Devils Own OS
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Is this the entire content of grub.conf ??