[Xen-users] ASUS A6Tc Laptop +Linux

[Art Fore <art.fore@xxxxxxxxx>]

Here are my experiences with the above laptop. It is not at all suited
for Linux and ASUS does not support Linux at all. (And I am in Taiwan,
the home of ASUS) My whole purpose of a new laptop was for the dual core
processor with hyipervisor (Pacifica) capabilities for running WinXP
under Linux.

Machine is AMD Turion X64_86 X2 dual core with Nvidia 7300 video card,
C51MV Nvidia chipset and 1280X800 15.4 inch LCD display. Very nice and
speedy machine in Windows and Linux without Xen. After that, it stinks,
even with Windows if you add another GByte of memore.

Here the the problems I experience with 2 GByte ram.

In both Suse 10.1 non Xen kernel and in WindowsXP, the USB mouse and
keyboard will intermittently freeze, and the only way out is the master
reset (Power Switch). Removing the extra 1 GByte ram seems to cure this.
I tried both the 533 MHz version and 667 MHz ram dimms. 667 version seem
to help quite a bit.

When booting into the Xen kernel, I get the following errors.

<4>0000:00:0b.0 OHCI: BIOS handoff failed (BIOS bug ?) 000007b4

<4>0000:00:0b.1 EHCI: BIOS handoff failed (BIOS bug ?) 01010001

This goes along with the other keyboard mouse problem.

Could not install WinXP. It gets to loading the drivers, and hangls the
machine. 

You cannot use the NVIDIA video driver and go into XEN. Only the "nv"
driver. I have a desktop with Nvidia 5700 video, and with works with a
patch to the 8762 nvidia driver, but not the 8674.

So, buyer beware of ASUS products for Linux and in some cases, for
Windows. An alternative is the MSI laptops. Many of the distributors
have customization and you can get Suse 10.2 or Red Hat preloaded as the
operating system. This is what I will be getting next.

I read on the internet several places about the problems with this ASUS
machine, unfortunately after I purchased the machine. Even the problem
with the 2 GByte memory was mentioned and that the BIOS is a mess.

Art






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