Emachines M6807 Laptop

v22 · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6 Location: USA

I found a BIOS update for my eMachines laptop! Unfortunately, it does not seem to solve any of the major BIOS bugs that limit these laptops in Linux.

I also created a quick and ugly website that will document my luck with BIOSes I, and hopefully others, will find.

Happy BIOS hunting...

_________________
My Unofficial eMachines BIOS site

rally · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2004 Posts: 7

I just tried the KNOPPPIX 3.4 2004-05-17 (KNOPPIX_V3.4-2004-05-17-EN.iso) works with 2 small exceptions:

1) wireless network does not work
2) The cpu does not get throttled down (so the battery wares out fast)

other than that you can boot it with kernel 2.6

It would be nice if gentoo made a simple install for these notebooks, I tried 4 times with gentoo and I got it working thanks to the help of people from this tread.

but to the ones that are still having problems they can try knoppix.

Also I am writing a letter to eMachines, that I am going to send to the president of emachines, and gateway and perhaps some to some review writers....

I suggest that other people doo that too.....

If enough people write to them they might realize that they are loosing future potential customers who had quite a bad experience and and will not purchase another eMachies system, it's all about numbers !

good luck

VMIfox · n00b Joined: 24 Jan 2004 Posts: 24 Location: Midwest

rally,

Would you post the letter you're writing so we can all get an idea of what you are saying. If emachines/gateway gets a bunch of letters with roughly the same complaints, they might be more likely fix those issues.

Kudos to those of you who have gotten everything working. I bought an M6805 and started to install Gentoo Tuesday. After numerous Stage1 and several Stage2 failures I broke down and used a Stage3 - so far so good, compiling the kernel now. I basically had the same problem as bhensch with 2004.1 when I could get that far. I've been using gentoo since 1.2 and haven't had this many problems for a long time - still love Gentoo though.

v22 thanks for the BIOS stuff, hopefully a fix will soon be found/made.

Neato I'd be interested in helping create an emachines install doc.
Best of luck to everyone.

v22 · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6 Location: USA

rally · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2004 Posts: 7

My Bios is 0F02.P00 dated 12/17/2003 and it's a m6807.

Just to make sure it's the 3.4 version dated 2004-05-17 as there are several versions of the 3.4 version.

Also the boot command that I use is "knoppix26"

Hope that helps.

PS:
On your site you mention that the m680x is an Arim a W730 K8 however this page:

http://www.amdboard.com/athlon_64_notebook.html

says that Arima A520 K8 is the m680x

I don't know who is correct but if you look at CPU-Z mainboard info it reports the southbridge to be VT8235 instead of the vt8237....

this might be relevant when flashing bioses....???
---------------------
yes once I have a decent revision of the letter I will post it.

v22 · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6 Location: USA

LordPhobos · n00b Joined: 22 May 2003 Posts: 15

For what it's worth, I just successfully installed SuSE 9.1 on my eMachines 6805 and have had a lot of success with it so far. The sound works just fine, as does most everything else, straight out of the box. I don't have any other wireless devices in my house, so I can't test out the wireless capabilities of the machine. Maybe those of you more knowledgable can crack open SuSE to see how they're doing it so easily so we can apply those ideas to Gentoo.

Has anyone gotten any of the eMachines 680x laptops to have 3d acceleration? It seems most forums deal with the wireless problems, but I seem to be the only one who really wants to run at 1280x800 (and not 1024x768, which is the best I can get so far) with 3d acceleration. I've installed the 3.7.6 drivers that were on the SuSE website, and I've tried the XFree86 config file from muru.com, but it's gotten me no closer. Figured I would see if anyone was more successful.

v22 · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6 Location: USA

LordPhobos · n00b Joined: 22 May 2003 Posts: 15

Actually, I installed SuSE 9.1 with AMD64 support (cd2 of the set). I suppose I could try to reinstall in 32bit mode, but that defeats the purpose of a 64bit cpu.

I don't know if pcmcia works or not because I don't have any pcmcia cards to test it with. Is there some other way to test it?

rally · n00b Joined: 20 Apr 2004 Posts: 7

Does ACPI work ? does it recognize the battery ?

Does the system work after you close and open the screen, or plug and unplug the power?

did you have to pass any specific kernel commands ?

thanks !

v22 · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6 Location: USA

Seeratlas · n00b Joined: 13 Apr 2004 Posts: 9

Well, I have all I need working now on my 6805, and like it a lot, the only thing left is that I cannot get any of the file sharing proggies to work. I'd like to use FastTrack and giFT but tho I can get the daemon to run and hook up, every time I try to do a search, it disconnects the daemon and kills the search. Doesn't seem to matter which front end I use..I've tried giftui, and apollon (i run kde 3.2.2.)

If I had this working I'd be happy

anyone got any ideas? or had success with this?

also is anyone running Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate on Gentoo with this lappie?

seer

Dariush · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 15

Has anyone of you succeeded in getiing function keys working in emachines (m6807)? I am mostly interested on Fn+f2 that turns on wireless card.

I have got ndiswrapper installed and so far everything looks fine. But I am stock on turning the wireless card on! To continue my testing I have to get the card turned on first

Thanks for your insight and help.

PS:I am running mm-sources-rc2.mm2 which is 2.6.7 with mm patches!

Chest_Rockwell · n00b Joined: 05 Jun 2004 Posts: 8

amnion · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 1

Have you tried using eth1 instead of eth0?

On my 6805, the ethernet port is eth1. This gave me uncountable headaches before I realized it. Also, did you create your kernel with genkernel, using the emachines kernel config?

wog_boy · Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2004 8:37 am Post subject:

OK I got the Universal AMD64 cd and the packages cd... After reading trough thousands of post I realized that on my cd there's an option called EMACHINES that means that I should have read thousands/2 posts... STILL I'm a complete noob to Linux and I'd like to get this thing running, I dont have a broadband connection and I got my cds from an online shop.
So please please dont tell me I'll have to download crap... !

nileshnimkar · n00b Joined: 30 Mar 2004 Posts: 6

Again long time no see. Finally I have everything up and running including the sound, touch pad, battery manager , apmd etc. The only sad thing is Wireless.
I downloded driverloader from linuxant. They allow you to load XP drivers on unix. Tried to compile it but it barfed saying it is meant only for 32 bit linux. Well has anyone had any luck with wireless and I mean the built in one.
Another thing is when I play movies, they play well in windowed but really choppy in full screen mode. Any idea ? Is 3-D accleration not being used ?

wog_boy · Posted: Fri Jun 11, 2004 3:53 pm Post subject:

I don't think 3d accel has anything to do with playing movies...
Can someone tell me the easyest way to create the nescessary partitions to install gentoo WITHOUT deleting my winxp partition ??? I'd only be using it for desktop use nothing serious like game server or mail server etc...

badcherry · n00b Joined: 29 Apr 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Medford, WI

The way that XP is installed on this HD makes it very difficult to save. As far as I could tell when the restore CD installs XP in wipes the HD and doesn't make a partition, but instead just drops the WinXP image directly on an unpartitioned HD. There was no HD tool or anything that I could find that would allow you to resize or modify this without destoring it. You best option as far as what to do would be to find a way to trick the install CD into installing on a partition. Perhaps running it emulated in some fashion would allow you to achive this. Myself I took a bit of an easier route (afterspending weeks trying to save the original XP image) and borrowed an illegal copy of XP and installed it into a partition and used the drivers off of the backup cd's.

Good Luck working with the original XP image, you'll need it.

badcherry · n00b Joined: 29 Apr 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Medford, WI

I have need to get my gentoo install on my M6805 on a PPP connection. As far as I can tell I can't get the builtin modem to work, and my exteral needs a port to use so those are n't the best of options right now. Anyone have any luck with a pcmcia card in it. Does pcmcia work at all? I can't seem to find any stores about pcmcia.

badcherry · n00b Joined: 29 Apr 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Medford, WI

One other thing to consider other than the pcmcia port is the usb port. Any thoughts on getting a usb modem to work, or any one I should look for.

badcherry · n00b Joined: 29 Apr 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Medford, WI

Off all the features that I don't have working on my laptop right now that I wouldl ike to get working it hibernation. Does anyone know how to get this to work with gnu/linux? Is it possible with the current bios bugs?

layyze · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2003 Posts: 47 Location: raw-lee

I succesfully got my Broadcom wireless working on my m6809 using ndiswrapper:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1255066#1255066

stuuf · n00b Joined: 25 Jun 2004 Posts: 4

v22 · n00b Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6 Location: USA

I acquired another BIOS! It is from a recently purchased m6809. Using kernel 2.6.x it works without the PCI=NOACPI and NOAPIC parameters.
In kernel 2.4.x I still have the same issues.

Keep 'em comming....
_________________
My Unofficial eMachines BIOS site