Sony Viao or Laptops with AMD chips and Redhat 7.2

[Doug Smith]

I just bought a Sony Vaio PCG-FXA32. If you load RH 7.2 on this
machine you will get a bunch of Oops errors and finally kernel panic.
The fix is to add "noathlon" to your kernel boot parameters in
lilo.conf or grub.conf (depending on what you use). Just thought I'd
share this in case someone else missed it in the Release notes and is
struggling with this problem. The pertains to any laptop with an AMD
chip I would think. I am guessing the power supply in this isn't
powerful or the chipset is substandard.

Maybe someone else knows a Bios setting that will allow us to run the
Athlon optimizations without crashing?

If your thinking of buying a laptop this seems like a good one for
Linux and no I am not affiliated with Sony in any way ;). Sound,
Video, DVD, network all seems to be working well. Haven't had a
chance to test the modem yet.

[brad]

Hello Doug,

In case you want some background info on the FXA32 or converse with people
that have the same class of machine check out my web site at
http://www.myplc.com/sony
and the Yahoo forum at;
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FX210

Lots of good info at both of these sites on the AMD based Sony Laptops.

Later,
Brad