Hey there linux gurus. Sigh... I wish I was one. I guess I'm on the path now.

For years I have been wanting to get into Linux and the opensource world. So finally a few weeks ago, I made a nice purchase on the new Emachine M3 series notebooks. I personally recommend them to anyone, solid performance, amazing battery life, and good price, oh yeah... and a Wide screen. Works beautifully in windoze, how on Mandrake it seems to now work. The laptop comes with onboard ATI Radeon IGP 32mb video, and it seems that Mandrake has autodetected that, however, my resolution of my laptop screen is an odd one. Its 1200x800 and I dont have an option to turn my resolution to that, so its stretching 1152x864 right now. So as my first introduction to linux, its not going so well. But I hear from my linux buddies that Linux is simply amazing becuase of the people that use it. So I hope to hear from some of you linux gods out there, and get some help. Of course, any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.

Wh33t

I have the m5310 which for the most part is the exact same laptop. I did find this link

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

which talks a little about getting the widesreen to work. I wasn't to excited about losing acceleration (You'l see it when you read it) I have noticed that at 1024x768 everything looks pretty good, infact if I didn't no better I would think that it is at it's native resolution anyway.

Did you have any luck getting some sort of power management working? This thing runs hotter then I would like, the dang fan never stops. In windows it was almost never on unless I was playing a game. I've been playing around with the 2.6 kernel, finally got one that would show a screen (had to enable VESA because it wasn't done by default or some crazy stuff like that) other then that I'm hashing my way trying to get it to work and hopefully a cooler laptop.

Thanks for the reply Adamis, Ill try that, and you know... I've only had linux on it for a few hours, so I haven't even really noticed how its doing on battery or the fan noises. Ill check into that later. Appreciate the help.

Wh33t

i was able to get most of the acpi working on my m5310 using the 2.6 test 6 kernel.

what i was NOT able to get to work was the broadcom wireless card, i tried the drivers provided by www.linuxant.com but i did not have any luck, if it wasnt for the wireless card i had everything working

Are you using Mandrake with the 2.6 kernel? I've been working with 9.2 RC2 and have been trying to get the 2.6 kernel to work. I've gotten it to boot but I'm still having some problems, could you post your config file or something and detail what you did? I'd appreciate it.

Lol. i cant beleive how many times i've edit this post.

So I've put in everything exactly how the tutorial adamis posted me, but now I'm getting "Caught signal 11. Server Aborting"

Any help guys?

Wh33t

Sorry, I'm not much help, I just decided to live with the 1024x768 because it looks fine at the moment. Maybe someone else could give you a hand.

adamis, a buddy of mine who is quite into bsd helped me solve this problem. The config from that tutorial just needed to change a few things. So here it is, feel free to copy and past this.

Section "Monitor"

Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Generic Laptop Display Panel 1280x800"
HorizSync 31.5 - 67.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 71.0
Option "dpms"

EndSection

Section "Device"

Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Videocard Vendor"
Boardname "ATI Radeon Mobility U1"
VideoRam 32768
ChipId 0x4242
Option "dpms"
# Option "UseFBDev"
# Option "noaccel"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
BusID "PCI:1:5:0"

EndSection

Section "Screen"

Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24

SubSection "Display"

Depth 24
Modes "1280x800" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"

EndSubSection

EndSection

notice commented out (#) useFBdev and noaccel and your good to go.

Wh33t