Linux and the Compaq R4000
When my Sony Vaio laptop died due to an overheating problem that fried the mobo, and the mobo replacement cost was prohibitively expensive, I replaced it with a Compaq R4000 and vowed to never buy another Sony computer.
My R4000 is a sweet machine, but it suffers from one major flaw; it runs Windows XP. Now, Windows does have its place in the world, God knows, but Linux is a great workstation O/S. Windows could probably be a better O/S if Microsoft didn’t develop it, but that’s another story. (Hey Redmond! Would it kill you guys to add POSIX compliance and/or a decent shell to the O/S so those of us who aren’t a slave to the mouse can get work done.)
My Sony Vaio ran SuSE Linux 8.3. Since it had been awhile since I had upgraded, I bought SuSE Linux 9.3 and tried to install it on my Compaq. I soon found out, however, that the Compaq laptop doesn’t really support Linux too well. Or vice versa.
I bought the R4000 primarily because it had an Athlon64 CPU. Coupled with a 15.4″ widescreen LCD panel, 1G of RAM and an 80G hard drive, and lots of bells & whistles such as a Memory Stick reader, I figured that I’d be golden. Some Linux distros had 64-bit versions of their O/S released, so I figured that it was time to push the envelope. (Windows XP Pro is a 32-bit O/S. There are 64-bit versions of Windows XP, but that option was not available for my laptop upon purchase and it costs money and has driver issues.)
The main problems revolved around a hardware clock that ran at double speed, the video subsystem that relied upon a poorly written, proprietary driver and wireless networking support. Frankly, I never even got to test the third issue, as the first two were enough to put the kibosh on using the system. So, for essentially a few months, only 30 out of 80G of disk space was being used by Windows XP and SuSE remained unbootable.
Yesterday, I downloaded and burned a Ubuntu Linux install CD. According to some sources, Ubuntu is the new wunderkind of the Linux distros. After basking in the warm glow of the press, and reading of some successful installations on R4000s, I decided to give it a try.
Well, it installed properly. Kinda. The doublespeed clock problem is gone. When I reboot into Windows, the clock shows the correct time, which didn’t happen before with SuSE. However, the X Server is completely off-line. The good news is that I can login to the machine via the normal console interface. (Thankfully, I installed with the boot option ‘vga=771′ via the on-line sources.) This will allow me to patch the system so that I can coax X11 back to life.
I won’t go into more detail a this point. I’ll keep you posted as I tinker with the system. I’m happy enough that I got this far; the keyboard actually works this time around.
The big issues going forward will be getting the GUI up and running, learning how to install/download code modules/drivers and getting the wireless networking stuff up and running. In spite of these hurdles, I’m optimistic. It’ll be nice to go back to using Linux again.