Guest Nny Posted March 6, 2005 Report Share Posted March 6, 2005 I am quite new to the whole linux world. Yesterday I built my father his new computer and I adopted his old computer for my pleasure. The conclusion I came to was to add linux onto this machine and learn more about it and hopefully become proficient. Well I started reading a number of websites and the biggest thing I read about install was hardware compatability. So I have come to this website in hopes of joining this community so I can learn more about Mandrake with the help of people who actually use it. But anyways. Here is my machine. I most the stuff should work with it, but the two things I'm worried about are the mobo/video. This is a eMachines with a 700 MHz Celeron processor. Right now I have no modems or network hardware inside so i don't need to worry about that. But the video is onboard and I have no clue what type of motherboard this is. My guess is it's proprietary or what ever to whatever eMachines wants. It doesn't even have an AGP port, so it's pure onboard. So if I could get any help on finding information, or if anyone knows for sure that eMachines should work with Mandrake 10.0 I would be quite thankful. I tried searching for eMachines on the forums but found nothing that seemed to be similar to my question, so I hope this hasn't been posted before. Thanks very much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted March 6, 2005 Report Share Posted March 6, 2005 I have a emachine 600is and everything works. Even the winmodem though I know you said you didn't have one. The video is the Intel i810 onboard and works fine. You shouldn't have any trouble, at least getting installed and running. We're here though :D Welcome to Mandrake Linux! Go install! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pbpersson Posted March 6, 2005 Report Share Posted March 6, 2005 I tried searching for eMachines on the forums but found nothing that seemed to be similar to my question, so I hope this hasn't been posted before. My other Linux machine is an eMachine. It was the one I first used to learn about Mandrake. It is an etower 566i2 and the front label says it has integrated Intel direct AGP graphics. Mandrake 10.0 and 10.1 both work great on it. Go for it! Phil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wxgeek Posted March 10, 2005 Report Share Posted March 10, 2005 Hi I'm new to the group, new to linux, but certainly not new to e-machines. I'm playing with mandrake 10.0 (not on the e machine) I can't believe somebody actually got a linux distro running on an Etower. My e tower is the 300k the cpu was replaced with a 550mhz AMD k62, 256MB ram and 20GB on the hard drive. I've tried Red hat 8.0 , tried playing with the KNOPPIX cd, but I came to the conclusion that emachines hates linux. I long since gave up. I appear to have been proven wrong. How much fiddling with the bios did you have to do, and where to get a successful install? Inquiring minds want to know Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted March 11, 2005 Report Share Posted March 11, 2005 nothing on mine....it's had Mandrake-8.1 to 10 Slackware Debian Red Hat Fedora LFS Ubuntu (currently) and others....it's the box I started learning linux on. On it's last leg now and barely runs Did you pass to the kernel linux acpi=off ? linux acpi=off noapic got me through an install once and it was really slow, but after install all that was needed in the bootloader was acpi=off I've upgraded (clean install/next version) mandrake before and linux acpi=off hindered the install. So it just depends on the kernel really. Your is obviously older than mine though. Have you looked into flashing the bios? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisM Posted March 11, 2005 Report Share Posted March 11, 2005 (edited) Yup, to join the crowd, I can vouch for emachines working with linux. My eTower667 has had Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 installed and running without any problems. Here is the official line which has been so for about a year that I know of. I'm considereing a flash upgrade (I can't get my CD/DVD combo to boot from the DVD - CD's are OK), on my machine I can't find the BIOS ID string - so you might want to check here for BIOS agent - this is also the company advised by emachines UK to ID the BIOS. Here is a link to an unofficial emachines site which might help you ID your mobo etc. And there is even a emachine upgraders forum Biggest issue I find is memory related - it only come with bog standard 64RAM and every stick I've tried to give it a boost is rejected after a short period of time - Its all salvaged but works OK in other boxes I have. Guess I'll have to buy some instead :( Go Mandrake go... Edited March 11, 2005 by ChrisM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pbpersson Posted March 20, 2005 Report Share Posted March 20, 2005 How much fiddling with the bios did you have to do, and where to get a successful install? Inquiring minds want to know I didn't do any fiddling with the BIOS, not that I can remember. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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