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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Martelli (aleaxit at gmail.com):

> 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).

I wasn't at the event -- but my mother-in-law used to have one of an
earlier generation (Celeron) of eMachines's boxes, and it was a terrific
little machine, especially at the price, with nothing notably
non-standard.  I was very impressed with it, at the time.

> 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?

As you probably found out, there are now quite a few distros supporting
AMD64 and x86_64 as first-class platforms.  It's something of a
continually-changing picture, too.

> 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!-).

1.  Congratulations.  ;->

2.  Even though I'm a long-time Debian sysadmin, I tend to disrecommend
Debian to people until they're relatively experienced with a couple of
other Linux distributions.

> 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.

Hmm, that's a new one.  (I believe you, of course.)  Sometimes, using
the installer's alternate 2.6-kernel boot option at the "boot:" prompt 
will get around such problems.  The non-obviousness of that alternate
installer kernel typifies the numerous reasons I steer a lot of people
away from the Debian installer.

> 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.

Yeah, that happens, sometimes.  I'm guessing that the installer just
couldn't deal with the EDID information from your monitor, for some
reason.

> 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, I have a page of starting points for you, which is sort of half a
loaf because it would be really nice if I could give you some tested
recipes, instead.  Here: "ZeroConf" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Hardware/

And kudos for persevering and prevailing thus far!

-- 
Cheers,      English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by
Rick Moen    Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of
rick at linux   Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and
mafia.com    Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that. -- Bill Hammel