Re: AMD Athlon 64bit processors and 32bit Linux distributions

From: General Schvantzkoph (schvantzkoph_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/18/04 

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:29:21 -0400

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 05:44:06 -0700, S Austin wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.10.18.03.24.38.222273@yahoo.com>...
>> On Sun, 17 Oct 2004 19:36:53 -0700, S Austin wrote:
>>
>>
>> > I beg of you, dear General, tell me what you did to make the touchpad
>> > work? Apologies to the OP for going OT, but I've been flailing for
>>
>> Sorry, you misread my post. I said that I wasn't sure if the trackpad
>> works. I use an external mouse so I assumed that the trackpad not working
>> was a function of the mouse being plugged in. It's possible that it
>> doesn't work at all. However I read in the release notes for Mandrake
>> 10.1RC1 a mention of the Synaptics track pad now working. I'm not sure if
>> 10.1RC1 is the release candidate for 10.1 Official or for 10.1 Community.
>> If it's for 10.1 Official it might be worth giving it a try because it's
>> newer than 10.1C. As I said in an earlier post Mandrake 10.1C didn't work
>> for me. However I use the club version of Mandrake which automatically
>> installs the Nvidia driver. It's possible that Mandrake is using an older
>> broken version of the Nvidia driver which would explain my problems.
>> Fedora doesn't include any binary drivers so I installed the Nvidia
>> drivers directly from the Nvidia website so I have the latest drivers
>> running under FC2.
>
> That's a good data point for me - perhaps it's a problem with the FC2
> distribution, not my inadequate thrashing. In desperation I posted to
> a number of laptop/linux/kernel/hardware usenet groups and as yet no
> response that anyone has the pad working with FC2.
>
> I'm not suspecting the nvidia driver; like you I installed from their
> website, but only after I had brought up X using the default nv
> driver. Even then the touchpad wasn't working, in fact when I booted
> from the FC2 cd, it made me plug in a mouse to continue the install.
>
> Have you tried doing the website nvidia install on your Mandrake dist
> - if they are using an older driver, presumably the web install would
> allow you to build over that one?
>
> Thanks
> S. Austin

I'm pretty sure I didn't try the doing an Nvidia install with Mandrake.
You need the kernel sources to install the Nvidia driver and I hadn't
installed Mandrake's sources. The one thing I hate about Mandrake is that
they overpatch the kernel, not fixes which are OK but adding features that
will never be in the mainstream kernel. Redhat doesn't do that, the Fedora
Kernel is pretty close to the mainstream kernel so it's easy to install
the latest generic kernel which makes it easier to build a custom kernel
and as a byproduct be able to install the Nvidia drivers.

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