[svlug] the continuing saga of the supercheap eMachines box;-)

[Alex Martelli]

So, as other installfest participants may recall, my wife Anna and I  
were at the installfest at Google yesterday, with our by-now-infamous  
$249-from-TigerDirect-on-special eMachines D6418 (Athlon 64 3200+,  
768MB DDR, 80GB HD, DVD±RW DL, etc), the accompanying 19" Acer AL1703  
LCD monitor, and a lot of determination to go away with a reasonable  
Linux installation on the box (not the feeble 32-bit "Mandriva One"  
that was the only one we had managed to install thus far).

Thanks *a lot* to all of you who helped out so generously -- even  
though, it turns out, most of your well-meaning indications and  
advice were in fact misleaded and misleading.  I was, fortunately,  
healthily skeptical about the nearly unanimous chorus of remarks such  
as "oh, it's an eMachines -- must be full of weird super-cheap  
proprietary chips and thus a lost cause"... if Mandriva One, feeble  
as it may be, could install just fine, I didn't really see how other  
distros could find the very same chips "too proprietary"!-)  And  
similarly for the DSL which claimed fsck had failed (fsck being  
needed because we had just removed power brusquely) while the  
messages from fsck itself claimed success, and the remarks THAT  
prompted about how it must be something weird of proprietary about  
the disk drive or controller -- even though a further reboot of the  
same DSL went just fine and the partition was similarly just fine.

No matter how much we all may detest eMachines, ATI, &c, or love (and  
feel well-justified heaps of gratitude for) all authors of Linux  
distributions and components, sometimes Occam's Razor is the best  
guide -- and here, in my opinion, good old Occam clearly pointed to  
most (or all) "simple", "small" and/or "easy/simplified" Linux  
distributions being pretty full of (different mixes of) bugs, sloppy  
coding, and/or excessive corner-cutting in the name of "making the  
user's life easier".  Sure, getting a somewhat-less-cheap box (one  
that's more likely to resemble what distro authors and maintainers  
are likely to develop and debug on) may well help avoid many of those  
corner cases -- if one's willing to do without some of the goodies,  
spend a little more, do some physical assembly, etc.  But, if one  
could get a solid, well designed and maintained distro which does  
_not_ cut corners etc, maybe the $249-wonder wasn't a lost cause.

So, getting home with the eMachines box still without a reasonable  
Linux install (now with a DSL 2.0 working semi-well, instead of the  
Mandriva) and with my mind full of such reflections, I thought about  
-- what distros might best qualify in those terms?  No corner-cutting  
to try to make things simple, etc, etc?  I thought of Debian and  
Gentoo (mostly on the basis of reputation rather than direct  
experience) and decided to try, downloading and burning the first CD  
of Debian testing (etch) for AMD64 (I might have gone with stable  
[sarge] but apparently there's no AMD64 version of that one, so  
testing [etch] it had to be).  Fortunately, my wife helped immensely  
throughout the process.

In the end, though I would _not_ describe the process as easy nor  
ever recommend it to anybody but hardcore geeks;-), we have just  
about everything working fine (or as fine as we need it!-).  The one  
bit in the BIOS settings that apparently had to remain disabled was  
the on-chip USB controller -- when enabled, it causes Debian's boot  
to just hang forever in the "detecting hardware" phase -- but every  
other aspect that we had at first disabled (APIC, ACPI, PnP OS, etc,  
etc) we could re-enable without problems.  And the one bit of manual  
configuration that proved necessary was in xorg.conf: had to add  
"HorizSync 30-82" to the "Monitor" section, otherwise X11, apparently  
not autodetecting the AL1703's correct range of hsync, would be stuck  
on 640x480.  But the free "ati" driver otherwise does a good job (for  
what we need) driving the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 (RS480) chip that  
comes with the box (no need to get proprietary drivers or agonize  
about the lack of 64-bit versions of such drivers and supporting  
libraries, etc;-), and so on.  Basically, I'm not really motivated to  
go on and try gentoo at this point, as debian etch works.

Basically, I'm at the stage where the worst open issue is, how do I  
get the box to fully participate like all others in my macs-filled  
house's zeroconf/rendezvous/bonjour arrangements -- right now the box  
"knows" it's called box.local (it can ping itself by that name;-) but  
can't solve the xxx.local names of other machines on the LAN, and  
other machines don't see it properly (by name, i.e., as box.local)  
either.  But, I can deal with having to call it 10.0.1.54 for a  
while, while I research the issues at leisure (yes, I do have avahi-*  
on the box already:-).


So -- thanks again to all who so willingly and generously helped or  
tried to help, and a message of hope to all who try to pinch pennies  
and get supercheap boxes on special...: even when the experts claim  
the situation is hopeless because of the cheap and/or "hopelessly  
proprietary" HW, and lightweight/"easy" distros (including Ubuntu)  
just don't work, everything is not necessarily lost: a bit of bios- 
setup-screens work, a sturdy distro such as Debian, a pinch of  
xorg.conf editing, and you may still be able to arrange things quite  
satisfactorily in the end!-)


Alex