SAM FLEX 800/1GB Linux Experince

All
Just to balance the ledger a little in regards to some problems on OS4.1/SAM with or without 1GB memory I thought I'd share my Linux experience with you.

My setup SAM Flex 800/1gb ram Radeon 9250/128mb

Firstly I followed Elwood's install instruction for Debian Lenny, all worked fine except I could not get Parthenope to recognise my FFS but it did work when I changed that to SFS.

I used the install disk available on the ACube site, I also downloaded 5 other instll CDs, this is not totally necessary but can speed up the actual install a little.

The install went fine, I was a bit surprised to find Gnome a bit sluggish, I did not expect Linux to fly on SAM HW but was surprised at how sluggish it seemed, (I have always been a KDE user and assumed KDE a heavier Desktop environment) so I installed Openbox and some other light weight desktops, window managers and panels to which I found a marked improvement.

Openbox and lxpanel work quite well with manpcFB file manager, somewhat faster than Gnome. My big surprise was loading KDE 3.5.10, it appears to be the fastest of them all with some bells and whistles. All in all it works pretty well, sound works without fiddling as does network and mounting USB devices. There are no graphical glitches at all but I cannot get DVDs to run full steam, however, this is not confined to SAM HW, apparently many distros on many platforms have this problem which appears to be a sata problem (I wonder if Amiga Sata drivers came from Linux originally).

Anyway, audio CDs play fine as do MP3s (and other formats) as well as Music clips like MPEG/FLV etc. Other fully functioning software include k3b, Openoffice, SMPlayer, Iceweasal, Icedove (Firefox and Thunderbird), Claws Mail, K9Copy, Gimp and XSane (scanning software). My printers were found automatically (HP 1210 PSC and canon ip4300). Most simple games work fine but BOSWARS runs slowly.

All in all a stable environment running serious excellent quality software at good speeds, obviously this HW will not break speed records but the ability to run Debian to undertake some tasks we can't do under AOS4x at this moment is a bonus.

Well done ACube and Cruxppc developers who made the 2.6.27.10 kernel run on SAM.

I may give some other distros a try soon.

ace

@acefnq
Thanks for the report :)

@ChrisH
Thanks Chris, i am about to try some other distros.

ace