Has anyone installed Gentoo on an X2?

avieth · Veteran Joined: 17 Sep 2004 Posts: 1945 Location: Canada

How does it run? Do you use SMP? Is it worth the big price tag?

shadowman · n00b Joined: 09 Jun 2004 Posts: 26

After fixing a few annoying problems (unrecognized NIC, timing issues with the nforce4 chipset), it works OK now. Yes, it does use SMP.

Is it worth the big price tag? It is to me. Currently I'm doing some research involving parallel programming (CS grad student), and it's nice to have an SMP machine at home to experiment with. Is it worth the big price tag in general? I can't say. I will say this though: as far as I know, there are very few things that can be done with 2 processors but not with 1.

robnotts · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2005 7:38 pm Post subject:

Hi, myself and shadowman seemed to be running a two-man battle at one point to get X2 working sensibly, but managed it... As long as you get the kernel configured properly, and have the correct bootlines in your grub.conf, you'll have no hassles at all... all the issues seem to have been resolved!

Quite happy with it... main reason for me having one... due to lack of fully optimised software, video processing on AMD64 Linux single processor is a little slow... but as the software is threaded, e.g. transcode, on an X2 it works like a dream... gone from an average frame rate of 11 to over 40, just by changing the processors... mine is actually the same speed as my last one socket 754 3200+ to socket 939 X2 4200+... an amazing improvement.

My machine is just to play on... don't really do anything serious on it... I have to use ACCESS for work purposes, and for compatability with school, I have to use it at home as well... so still have a windows machine... I'd be quite happy to change to MYSQL and a decent set of PHP scripts, but that is another story.

Rob.

PS: If you do take the plunge, there is plenty of help... do a search on the forums, most problems seem to have been solved... but if you come across any others, I'll be glad to try and help.
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Gentoo Phenom][ X4 955 on AMD790 + Geforce 220GT 8GB/1.75TB (Desktop)
+ MythTV (3xFreeview,1xFreesat HD) on 1080p
Gentoo Turion64 X2 Geforce 6150 2GB/120GB (Laptop)

scottandrews · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2005 Posts: 9

I haven't managed to get it working. I get a Kernel Panic - 'Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler'.

AMD Athlon 64 x2 4800+ Dual Core
4GB PC3200 DDR400 CL3
1 x 74GB WD Raptor 10k RPM SATA
2 x 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 16MB Cache SATA
256MB nVidia GeForce 6800 GT
Creative SB Audigy2 ZS Plat.

Any ideas? I searched but nothing's really helped. This is using the Live CD's.

robnotts · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2005 10:04 pm Post subject:

What version of the livecd?

If it has kernel 2.6.12-r6 or better, then try adding timer=pmtmr notsc to the boot line, see if that helps... The problem could also be to do with powernow, if that is enabled in the kernel on the livecd, as that is only stable from kernel 2.6.12-r8.

Rob.
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Gentoo Phenom][ X4 955 on AMD790 + Geforce 220GT 8GB/1.75TB (Desktop)
+ MythTV (3xFreeview,1xFreesat HD) on 1080p
Gentoo Turion64 X2 Geforce 6150 2GB/120GB (Laptop)

Kestrel · n00b Joined: 31 May 2003 Posts: 2

I had a similar problem to your

paulisdead · Guru Joined: 10 Apr 2002 Posts: 510 Location: Seattle, WA

If you're big into multimedia than ya it's worth it. As was mentioned transcode's multithreaded. The recent versions of dvdshrink are multithreaded and have worked fine in wine for me. Also gcc is multithreaded so a lot of compiles get a nice speedup, but not all. Also if you want to do cpu intensive things while using the computer the difference is nice.
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"we should make it a law that all geeks have dates" - Linus

robnotts · Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2005 8:21 am Post subject:

Couldn't agree more paulisdead... And if I want to use the machine whilst doing something intensive in the background... sticking a

scottandrews · n00b Joined: 17 Jul 2005 Posts: 9