No 64bit linux on my hp pavilion laptop
 

I just bought that shiny new hp laptop from Staples which if you're in the UK you'll have seen on TV for the amazing low price of £699 etc. etc.

However, I've tried various 64-bit operating systems (SUSE 10.0 64bit, Kubuntu breezy 64-bit, Fedora C5 64bit)on my hp pavilion 1.8 ghz AMD-64 turion dv5046ea a few times now. They won't install

When I try to install, with SUSE on normal settings the screen just goes black, and on Kubuntu and SUSE on text mode/safe settings I get the error messages further below. I tried fiddling around with a few of the options (using textmode and safe settings), but everything failed, to varying degrees of miserableness.

I know for certain that the media I am using is fine. The DVDs and CDs I have I've checked a few times.

However: I also have e.g. the SUSE 10.0 CDs for the 32-bit version. They install fine!!
Why does the 64-bit version not install but the 32-bit version does? It is rather peculiar.

How can I get it to install?

I would really like to have SUSE 10.0 64bit on my laptop. But if that's not possible, I'd like 64-bit linux *anything* on my laptop, as long as it boots at least the speed of SUSE 10.0 and is fairly user friendly. (I have not tried SUSE 10.1 as the boot times are supposed to be twice as long as for 10.0, as I read in a review for Linux Format magazine)



Thanks.





the error messages, which were the same for both Kubuntu and SUSE 10.0
2) I tried changing the resolution to Text-mode to see if that would solve the problem. SUSE now started outputting text- good. However, it gave this almost shakesperian message of woe:




...and then stopped a few lines down at:




3) So then on SUSE I tried using "Installation - Safe Settings" along with "Text-mode" resolution, to see if this would turn off acpi and perhaps fix the issue.
It got past the "Subsytem revision 20050408", but this time stopped at:

and that was it!

[EDIT]: This post originally appeared in the SUSE forum, but having tried out Kubuntu and seen that the problems were not specific to SUSE, I realised that my question would be better suited to this section. I have deleted the contents of my previous post and ask if the moderators might not penalise me for changing the forum I've asked in.

I can't really help you much, since I don't have this laptop (I haven't seen the Staples ad in question though; the last laptop ad I remember seeing was PC World trying to flog some piece of overpriced rubbish...), but suffice to say that:

1)This is not a fatal error - it's an extra patch added to the kernel by both Kubuntu and SuSE to look for a replacement DSDT to load to replace the one your laptop provides (see the ACPI4Linux documentation on this: http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/index.php). All this error refers to is that you do not have a replacement DSDT to load to override the one provided by your laptop. (You probably don't need one.)

2. AFAIK, AMD64 chips must have ACPI enabled in the kernel.

It could well be an x86-64 kernel bug (or one of the various patches the above distributions have added to their kernels). Perhaps you could try to dig up a 64 bit live cd and see if that will fully boot?

Well I just managed to get Fedora C5 x86-64 to install. (In the case of Fedora, it was something to do with the partitioning, which I fixed with gparted live cd).

Given that the Fedora core5 release is the newest, I think its just that the SUSE/Ubuntu releases being from last year didn't yet support my hardware becuase, of course, my hardware wasn't around at that time! (Should have thought of that. Nevertheless, in my own defence I didn't think my hardware was really that new).

So the next Ubuntu / SUSE releases probably will. However, as I would prefer to be able to use SUSE10.0 rather than 10.1, which has a much slower boot time as I've said, I'm just wondering if there's a workaround I could use to get 10.0 working.

If not, Fedora isn't too bad, so I might just have to wait until SUSE 10.2 and see if the boot times are any better for that!


Thanks for the feedback