Re: [gentoo-laptop] amd turion laptop with good linux support (but i run gentoo so good gentoo support is the point)

[Mike Benson]

OK , I have an Asus Z81K, which is the barebones version of the A2000K.

AMD64 support works, by and large, well in Linux. When you're only doing stuff 
that works, it's a pleasure.

Don't pan NDisWrapper too much, with a 64-bit Windows driver, I've had minimal 
problems with it. Performance actually seems to be better than my wife's IBM 
T42p, using the 32-bit Windows driver.

But,

* You are critically dependent on the quality and standards conformance of the 
BIOS, especially in areas like APIC and frequency control (I still don't have 
freq control working, after a year). The Asus is very bad in this respect

* I would strongly suggest you only get a Turion-based system. My system 
(processor is a Mobile 3700+) is inclined to overheat in summer, if I'm 
re-emerging gcc or something else particularly large, although removing "-j2" 
from the flags in make.conf improved that somewhat.

* I have ATI graphics (mobility 9700) and it's a pain. The only way I've ever 
been able to get a stable X display without artifacts, snow and noise is to 
use the binary ATI drivers, which usually lag kernel development, and do not 
install nicely or easily (although Gentoo seems to be making a better fist  
of it than Fedora or Kubuntu).

*  You will have general problems with stuff that isn't ported yet. Either 
because the developers can't get their heads around playing nicely with data 
types, and not assuming things (particularly pointers) are 32 bits, or don't 
use a recent version of autoconf that handles --enable-suffix (so things go 
in lib64), or in the case of propietary, binary only things, because they 
haven't got round to doing (or haven't be able to, or won't, do) a 64-bit 
port. Flash, and multimedia codecs are probably the biggest gotchas here (and 
don't flame me about WDNNS Flash! Like it or lump it, swf is a part of the 
web landscape, and sometimes can't be ignored)

* PCMCIA was unstable for a long while. I haven't tried it lately, but expect 
it has improved in recent kernels. Ditto for firewire (but at least that 
worked). USB has worked very well.

* Be prepared to build your own kernel. Be prepared to live inside testing 
(enable ~amd64 in your use flags, and sometimes even ~x86 for certain 
packages). Even today, running AMD64 is being on the bleeding edge. As a 
consolation, most bugs are fixed quickly, at least into testing.

* I've been running Gentoo about a month, after nearly a year with the machine 
running Fedora (Core 2 and 3) and a couple of weeks with Kubuntu 
(unresolvable display problems forced me off that). I seem to be rebuilding 
or adding some packages every day, but it's kinda more fun than running yum 
over and over again. And it was the lagging KDE support that drove me off 
Fedora, I don't have that problem with Gentoo.

Hope this helps,

Mike
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