Last update: 2002-06-07.
I bought this laptop online from CostCo for $829. It's a great deal, but you'll need to do some kernel patching to shut the fan up and to set up the sound chip.
Mandrake 8.1 installed without a glitch but wouldn't boot. Solution: load SuSE 7.3 instead (and remember to patch up the openssh loophole).
The CPU runs hot and the FAN is very noisy. I bought the laptop to be my silent home server that runs day and night in the family room. So the noise would have been a deal breaker.
Solution:
lvcool.
It makes the AMD CPU read a ``sleep'' register instead of executing the
HLT instruction. Actually lvcool causes the system to
freeze after a few seconds because of an interrupt race condition. I
fixed the race condition (the lvcool author hasn't updated
the page yet; it still speculates
about the potential reason).
Now the laptop is mostly silent, but even when it is idle, it occasionally runs the fan (but not on the maximum noise level).
Since the lvcool page seems to be (temporarily?)
inaccessible, here's my patch.
Important: Never run the lvcool
program. The kernel patch is enough. The program will hang your system
with or without the patch.
Sound doesn't work without a patch. SuSE and other ALSA users need to use this one.
NFS locks up. I'm using the laptop as a server, and I want to run NFS on it. I can mount the NFS filesystem whether the client is local or remote and even see the directory listing of the filesystem root. But that's all the remote client is able to do. I can't see deeper in the filesystem and I can't cd into it. The I/O call simply locks up indefinitely.
I don't (yet) believe this has anything to do with the laptop, but I'm working on the sound at the moment. I have heard ReiserFS and NFS at one point were somehow incompatible, but I have no idea whether those issues have anything to do with my situation.
Unloading of driver hangs the system. If I rmmod my wireless LAN card, the system freezes totally. That means I can't cleanly shutdown the system. The likely immediate reason is that the device keeps interrupting after the driver is unloaded, and the unprocessed interrupt puts the CPU in a coma.