Thursday, April 13, 2006

Linux on twinhead efio 12KTL series

Just a quick update: Zenwalk 2.4 is now out (http://www.zenwalk.org/) which comes with Xorg 7.0, which has the unicrome driver included. Bottom line is, if you can't get your unicrome card working, try Zenwalk 2.1 as it autodtects it and sets it up for you. As more distro's move to Xorg 7.0 this should become more common. At the moment the unicrome driver doesn't support 3D, so its great for your DVD's but no good for any openGL stuff. There is another project OpenChrome http://www.openchrome.org/ which is supposed to support 3D, but I've not tried this one, so I can't say how easy/hard it would be. This how to may also help too http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=26963&group_id=102048

Monday, December 19, 2005

Linux on twinhead efio 12KTL series

Twinhead Laptop homepage
twinhead efio 12KTL series - http://www.twinhead.com.my/product_detail.asp?productid=56&type=1

Tip
If you press your reseller hard enough, it comes pre-loaded with Abec Linux, but its old and out of date, and they haven't bothered to support all the laptops hardware. At least they do offer a Linux option though!

Distro's tried:
Zenwalk 2.0 - http://www.zenwalk.org/ - Easy!
Gentoo 2005.1 - http://www.gentoo.org/ - Experts only!
Vector Linux 5.1 - http://www.vectorlinux.com/ - Easy, but Still can't get sound :(
Slackware 10 - http://www.slackware.org/ - Medium

Boot loaders
lilo works, but need to specify LBA=32 in lilo.conf
Can't get grub to work :(

Hardware
CPU - Mobile AMD Sempron Processor 2800+ 256KB L2 Cache
Chipset - North Bridge VIAK8N800 / South Bridge VIA 8235M-CE
Memory - 256MB DDR SDRAM by default. N.B. Graphics card takes a share of this
Hard drive - 40GB
DVD - 8X DVD-Rom and CDRW combo drive
Display - 12.1 " TFT Panel with XGA resolution
Graphics - AGP 8X hardware 2D/3D 128-bit. xf86-video-unichrome (S3 UniChrome - http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/) 2D works ok under standard vesa driver, but no good for playing DVD's
Sound - PCI Audio AC-97 2.2 (Alsa driver via-82xx)
Modem - Internal 56K V.90 (Not tested this)
Network - Integrated 10/100M bit Ethernet Wireless - Mini PCI wireless LAN 802.11 b/g (apprently ra, but not sure)

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