The Averatec 6240 Laptop

[Fred]

Thought I'd share this with all.

My aging Sony Vaio laptop bit the proverbial dust recently. Something to
do with the connectors for the RAM cards, and would cost way too much to
"fix" -- $600 I am told, and all Sony will do with it is swap out the
board for another. Well, for just twice that price I can get the latest
and greatest, so why bother with an expensive repair?

So I dashed off to Microcenter in Cambridge. They usually have an
excellent selection of hardware -- for a brick-and-mortar store, that is
-- and I couldn't wait for a laptop to be shipped to me. I had Knoppix
firmly in hand so I could test what worked well with Linux and what
didn't.

Once there, I tried out a number of laptops on display with Linux. Some
worked, some didn't. The salesman was quite patient with me as I
Penguinized laptop after laptop. He was quite a chatty fellow, but that
was OK by me.

I was determined not to buy another Sony product after my experiences,
so I skipped all the Viaos on purpose. 

Then I came across a slick looking laptop -- an Averatec. Shiny
magnesium case and all, 1280x800 display. Plucked Tux in and it worked
like a charm. Then I noticed there was an AMD64 version that was not on
display.

Curious, I egged the salesman to bring it out here so I could try
Knoppix on it. To my surprise, this gentleman had no problem with that.
So he disappeared and came back with this little gem -- the Averatec
6200 series. Same slick-looking magnesium case, 1280x800 screen, and
very light to boot.

Eagerly, I plopped in the CD and tried to boot off it. The boot died
while loading the deamons. I checked and found that the default Knoppix
boots with a 2.4 kernel and thought that could be the problem. So I
tried it instead with the 2.6 kernel and to my delight it came up
without a hitch. I did a little checking online and Averatec was rell
regarded in the Linux community, so I nabbed it.

Now, Knoppix uses a 32-bit kernel, but I want to take advantage of the
64-bit power, so I grabbed the 64-bit version of Fedora Core 3 and
installed that. It worked. Then I grabbed the latest kernel from
kernel.org and configured it for the AMD64. That worked like a charm
too.

Now to the fun stuff. The 6240 uses SiS technology for the display and
some of the other peripherals. The version that the display uses is not
yet supported under linux (wah!), so it falls back to the VESA 1024x768
mode. Oh well, I can live with that until a driver comes out. 

I did get everything else working under Linux, including the built-in
802.11g Wi Fi. As usual, I had to find the driver for it online and
compile/install it, but it works. It was actually easier to get it
working than the Belkin Wi Fi card I used in my older clunky laptop. 

With the 80GB Hard drive, I made it dual-bootable with Windows XP pro
because there are those unfortunate times I need to run Windows. The
Averatec ships with XP home, but the CDs will only allow you to install
XP to factory conditions without the ability to partition the drive --
must be standard to do it that way these days, and completely useless to
me in any case. This also represents the first time I've installed XP on
any of my machines -- my interests in Windows waned after 2000 -- and I
find the new XP shell quite annoying, so I sat it back to the "classic"
shell settings that I am more comfortable with. 

Overall, I am pleased with the Averatec 6240. I am waiting with bated
breath, though, for a SiS video driver for the 64-bit Linux. In the
meantime, I am wondering if it is possible to modify the VESA driver to
give me the 1280x800 mode. Any ideas are welcome.

-Fred