The eOne FAQ v1.0 Contents 1. What is the eOne? 2. Why would I want one? 3. Is their expandability? 4. It looks a lot like an iMac. Is it MacOS compatible? 4a. What would the emulated MacOS performance be like on an eOne? 4b. But my friend with an iMac has a [game, tool, app] which I'd really like to use. 5. How do I upgrade it? 5a. I want to add more memory. 5b. I want to add more hard drive space. 5c. I want to add a different Ethernet card. 6. I've hosed up my eOne and now the BIOS does not recognize anything. 7. I've hosed up my eOne and now the CD-ROM does not open. 8. How do I install Windows 98? 9. How do I install Linux? 10. Does the BeOS run on the eOne? 11. Does Solaris x86 run on the eOne? 12. Does Windows NT (2000, Terminal Server, etc.) run on the eOne? 13. FAQ Caveats, Contributors, Words of Thanks, Contact Information 1. What is the eOne? The eOne is an integrated, all-in-one style computer from eMachines, Inc. It first debuted in 1999 as an aqua-blue and white machine with a built in 15" monitor, CD-ROM and floppy drives, stereo speaker set, 64mb of RAM, and 6.4GB hard drive. Additionally, it has video and audio in (for gaming or watching TV through a VCR), two PCMCIA slots (two Type II or one Type III), two USB, parallel port, two serial, 10baseT Ethernet with HomePNA capability. All eOne's come with a RAGE XL video chipset with 8mb of video ram. All eOne's use the Intel Celeron CPU, earlier machines came with a 433mhz chip, later models feature a 466mhz CPU or a 500mhz CPU. All 500mhz models also have an upgraded hard drive with an 8.4GB capacity. 2. Why would I want one? For the same reasons as why you would want an Apple iMac - ease of use, simplicity, low cost, cool design, and a compact layout. It makes an idea dorm or home office machine, with more than enough horsepower to do most productivity applications and multimedia design. The memory and screen size are its greatest inherent limiting factor for doing more serious work, but adding memory and hard drive space are possible (but voids factory warranty). In some ways, the eOne is better than an iMac, as it comes with a built in floppy drive, and even in its most basic configuration, has parallel, game and standard serial ports (as well as USB) for maintaining compatibility with legacy peripherals. It also comes standard with a Video-In feature which allows for simple editing and multimedia effects, well before the Apple iMac DV editions were available. Depending on your point of view, the breadth of applications (whether for Windows or Linux) with the eOne is probably better. If you need a super expandable machine, there are plenty of options besides the eOne, and you're probably better off buying one of those. If you like the size and feature-set (not to mention the price after the rebate scheme) of the basic eOne, it's a nice machine. For those of us who are tired of spending money on upgrades year after year and need a simple, quiet workhorse, the eOne makes for a good compromise. 3. Is the eOne expandable? Officially, the factory manual states that eOne is only meant to be expandable through the PCMCIA ports, parallel port, or through the serial port. You can add a variety of peripherals this way, including SCSI controllers, modems, network cards, memory, scanners, CD-burners - everything a normal PC could add in this manner, or more specifically, everything a normal laptop could add through these ports. Unofficially, there are other options, please see below in section 5. Fortunately, the makers of the eOne used relatively standard components when building the core pieces of the machine, so internal expansion of hard drives and memory is not out of the question. NOTE: The author and maintainers of this FAQ neither condone nor recommend the opening of your eOne for any purpose. We will not be held liable for any damage to you, your property or anything or one else as a direct result of your upgrade. If you fry it somehow or shock yourself to death, we told you so. It is possible to update the hard drive with a larger model (an eOne with 25GB drive comes to mind) and upgrade the memory through the onboard memory slot. There are no PCI slots or other internal expansion, and in most likelihood, you won't need it because of the eOne's built in features. ~ See section 5 for more information on upgrading the eOne ~ 4. It looks a lot like an Apple iMac. Is it MacOS Compatible? In a word, no. Despite the visual similarities, the eOne is NOT a MacOS compatible machine, and it does not run MacOS applications of any kind. If you want to run MacOS applications on the eOne, you will need to install a product like vMac or Gemulator SoftMac 2000 which runs under Windows or Linux. You will need to supply your own Mac ROM file (or Gemulator card), and MacOS (to MacOS8.1). The emulated Mac is only a faux-Motorola 68040 based machine, and while quite capable, not cutting edge. It does, however freak out your Mac friends when they see you running OS8 full screen on an Intel-based, eOne. For more information on SoftMac2000, please see: www.emulators.com For more information vMac, please see: www.vmac.org 4a. What would the emulated MacOS performance be like on an eOne? Since this is way off topic, suffice to say it will be comparable to any other Celeron 433, 466 or 500mhz machine running Win98 or Linux and the vMac or SoftMac 2000 product. Your mileage may vary depending on trip conditions and snow tires however. 4b. But my friend with an iMac has a [game, tool, app] which I'd really like to use. If it works under a 68040-based "classic" Mac, then it might run. Otherwise, buy a Mac. 5. How do I upgrade the eOne? The most obvious, least painful way of upgrading the eOne is through the PCMCIA ports, serial ports and parallel ports. For example, it's quite easy to buy a PCMCIA SCSI controller or a PCMCIA 100mbit network card. Memory is also possible to add through the PCMCIA port, but it tends to be poor value when compared to other alternatives. It's also quite easy to attach an external CD-ROM burner or scanner through the eOne's parallel port or USB ports. Ditto for Zip drives or anything else parallel or USB based for that matter. Most users have few problems in this case. 5a. How do I upgrade the eOne's hard drive? In a nutshell, should you decide to violate your factory warranty and replace the hard drive, you will need to purchase a standard 3.5" IDE UltraDMA drive of your favorite size, open the eOne (as described below), and swap out the old drive for the new one. It requires nothing more than a simple change out replacement of the old internal drive with a new, larger model. Upon powering up the eOne again, make sure that the BIOS recognizes the drive, the reconfiguration is saved, and from there, all you have to do is the usual format and install of your favorite operating system. 5b. How do I upgrade the eOne's memory? There is an empty, onboard memory slot consisting of a socket for a 144 pin, 3.3v SODIMM. The quick, painful answer is no, a normal PC100 168 pin DIMM memory will not work. However, SODIMMS are becoming increasingly common, with their widespread use in iMacs and notebooks, so procuring a 128mb module really is not a headache. Here is the description on adding RAM, verbatim from a user who has done it: "In order to add RAM you have to flip the eOne over and remove all the screws from the bottom of the machine. I believe there are two towards the front and two towards the back. Also you have to flip up the stand, and there is a screw in each hole that the stand rests in. Just unscrew these, don't take them out. "Once all the screws are removed, pull lightly on the base and the plate should remove, but be careful since there are 2 cables on left side when flipped upside down connected to the base. Once the bottom plate is off, disconnect all the cables connecting to the metal box except for the power cable. For the power cable, remove the metal half cylinder around the cord. Remove the single screw at the back of the metal box. Now gently pull the metal box backward and lift, but be careful that the power cable is not getting caught on anything or tearing. "Now flip the box upside down and there is your motherboard with one available RAM slot. Install the memory by pushing firmly. Once you are done, make sure to connect every cable back where it goes including the cables attached to the base that you pulled off. The eOne takes a 144 Pin 3.3V PC100 SODIMM. I ordered mine from www.atman-usa.com since they had the best prices. I would only suggest adding Peripheral Enhancements memory, which they do sell." 5c. How do I upgrade the eOne's Ethernet card? For some users, the eOne's 10mbit/PNA, Intel based Ethernet card is not fast enough, or is of the wrong type (Ethernet instead of ATM, Token Ring, etc.). Unfortunately, due to the fact that the eOne lacks internal PCI expansion, you cannot simply add a PCI based card. Instead, the eOne's PCMCIA slots can be used to add the adapter of your choice. Now that PCMCIA cards are pretty much universal, this solution works out pretty well, though PCMCIA cards do command a higher premium over their similarly performing PCI cousins. Check with the documentation of the PCMCIA card and of the operating system you are using for more information on when is appropriate and when is not to insert the PCMCIA cards. Although PCMCIA cards are supposed to all be hot pluggable (and electrically they are), occasionally OS support for these cards is somewhat buggy and may require a reboot to properly recognize and install. Your mileage may vary, but the eOne from a hardware perspective (and usually a Win98 perspective) supports these cards just fine. 6. I've hosed up my eOne and now my BIOS doesn't recognize anything. This is common to most PC's and can occur when you are changing IRQ settings or playing with the autorecognize features of modern hardware and the BIOS becomes confused as to what is installed in the machine and what's not. Quite simply, power down your eOne, wait 10 seconds, power up the machine and press when the eMachines logo comes up. This will put you in the BIOS configuration screen and allow to select an option called "Restore Defaults". Select this option, then save to the BIOS, and your factory defaults should be restored without a problem. 7. I've hosed up my eOne and now the CD-ROM doesn't open. I take the answer verbatim from a user who had this very thing happen, and the subsequent eMachines technical support response: "Anyway, an uninstall of lnx4win leaves win98 unable to recognize the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM door won't even open. I called tech support about this, here's what I had to do: Unplug the eOne from the wall. That's right, unplug it for about 15 seconds, then plug it back in, then the CD-ROM door will open again." He also suggested that occasionally after particularly nasty hacking sessions, the CD-ROM may refuse to open, you may also have to unplug the machine AND restore the BIOS defaults to get the machine to rerecognize the CD-ROM drive as a device (see Question 7). Naturally, if you've made any modification to the BIOS (after adding a hard drive, memory, etc.) they will be lost and you will need to enter them again. 8. How do I install Windows 98? Or, I'm having problems booting. How do I re-install the Master Boot Record (MBR)? The eOne owners guide has very clear instructions on how to re-install the eOne with Win98. The eOne supports a bootable CD-ROM, and there is very little more involved than booting up the Win98 CD-ROM, deleting any hard disk partitions which may be undesired, formatting the disk, and reinstalling Win98. The eOne uses a specialized video driver that comes pre-installed on the eOne Win98 CD-ROM. If you reinstall the OS using just a regular Win98 CD-ROM, it probably will not contain the driver and the machine may or may not work with the default driver. At best, it will probably be limited to basic 256 color functionality. Also, the eOne OS disk contains copies of all drivers and software that comes with the eOne from the factory. This includes such niceties as the ATI Video-In display software, various ISP freebie promotions, and Microsoft Works, a relatively useless productivity package that somehow made it out of the late 1980's and Windows 2.0 without a change. If you are having issues with Windows booting (and I quote): "try booting the system from a win98 boot disk with fdisk.exe copied to it. Run fdisk /mbr from the c:\ prompt, then fdisk again and delete the primary dos partition, create a new one, then start up the system from the eMachines restore CD-ROM and do a complete re-install. Then of course you'll want to do the windows update thing to get everything up to date in win98." Please note that this also reinstalls Win98, the OS that came loaded on the eOne from the factory. It also would reinstall the Master Boot Record, possibly overwriting LILO or any other tool you'd use to manage your multiple partitions on the eOne. As a result, this could render any other OS's unbootable on your eOne, even though they may actually exist on the other partition(s). 9. How do I install Linux? Linux is, surprisingly enough, one of the main reasons why many people buy the eOne, after the cool design and compact layout. Combined in one package, the machine has the basis for a very attractive, portable and reasonably powerful Linux workstation. This would be great, if it weren't for issues that are currently being resolved with Linux and the eOne's video system. In a nutshell, when you go to install Linux (of various flavors), the installation program seems to run fine from a video perspective, and most core pieces of the OS install without a relative hitch. In fact, everything but one piece goes well. However, once the X-Window configuration begins to take place, either the automated probe can't determine which video card settings to use, or it comes up with incorrect settings that cause the video card to either display nothing but scrolling, colored gibberish, black screens which cause the eOne's power button to blink (indicating loss of monitor sync), or nothing at all. Note that the core OS works just fine from the command line, just the X-window server subsystem seems to have issues. If all you plan to do is run everything from a shell, Linux works well. Otherwise, read on. Extensive efforts have been made to try and manually configure the X-server to use only a narrow band of display variables, mostly to no avail. A couple of people have reported having some success with the VGA-16 Xserver, but further examination of video timing settings causes the server to either lock or become unresponsive. Emails have been flying back and forth for some time on this issue. If you'd like to join the mailing list for eOneians (join the brethren!) or have a solution to the dilemma, please send an email to: Linux-eOne-subscribe@onelist.com, or to message the owner, send an email to: Linux-eOne-owner@onelist.com. At the present, there are no results yet from emails sent to KDS (the makers of the monitor who referred us to their site in Canada), eMachines, the Miscellaneous Linux newsgroups or the Xfree86 group. Hopefully someone will be able to point out the error of our ways and we'll be rolling. Several users have also been experimenting with Mandrake's lnx4win, a Mandrake program that configures and installs a set of large Linux files from within a Windows C:\ drive. Ironically, these files are actually EXT2FS, and seem to work pretty well without destroying the rest of your Windows partitions; a particularly handy thing if you are not very sure about disk partitioning or simply want to run Linux without the hassle of moving partitions around with something like resize or Partition Magic. Lnx4win gives you a multi-optioned boot window, and its interface allows you to gently boot into Linux from Windows. As an aside (and cheap plug for Mandrake...Go Mandrake!), a very cool feature of Mandrake is its supermount facility to automount anything you put in, along with lnx4win's standard feature of a /mnt/dos which seamlessly gives access to your dos files. 10. Does the BeOS run on the eOne? As of version 4.5, BeOS does not run on the eOne, almost with the same results as Linux. After starting the machine with the BeOS boot floppy or CD-ROM, the BeOS install program seems to recognize all hardware in the eOne, starts to install the OS, and then mid-way through the installation process when it comes to work with the video settings, determines that it can't utilize the eOne's display hardware and then defaults into a black and white, low-res video mode. After this point, BeOS continues to install, finishes installation and boots itself quite happily into the standard VGA low-res black and white video mode, where in theory, you are supposed to be able to patch or hack it with an appropriate driver. Unfortunately, I have neither experimented or played around with any of the included BeOS video drivers (of which there are only a few) in order to see if one of them can be made to work with the eOne. There is hope, however. In version 5 of the BeOS, Be is releasing a version that will install and boot from within Windows, on a virtual partition, with little or no system performance degradation. It is unclear if BeOS will use the existing Windows 98 drivers to display everything or use its own drivers. According to Be, this version will be free and downloadable on or before 31-March, 2000. When it is available, this FAQ will be updated with the results. Please see the following web address for more information: www.be.com 11. Does Sun Solaris x86 run on the eOne? As of this writing, the only information that has been submitted to the FAQ were experiences trying to install Solaris v2.6 x86. It did not install, due to the fact that it would not recognize the existence of the eOne's CD-ROM drive, and subsequently couldn't find a boot device to launch the CD based portion of its installation routine. This piece is well before the video segment of the installation routine. If anyone has tested Solaris 7 or Solaris 8 (Early Access edition or regular release), please forward me the results and I will be more than happy to include them in this FAQ. At the risk of starting a Solaris x86 versus Linux flame war, the eOne would also make a fine Solaris box. It could follow the tradition of a Sun Microsystems Voyager machine (an all-in-one, LCD screen based design sold during the time of the SPARCstation 4 and 5 series) that would be compact, portable, and enterprise class 12. Does Windows NT (2000, Terminal Server, etc.) run on the eOne? At the present time, no-one has verified the functionality of the eOne with Windows NT (2000, Terminal Server, yak-blah) with the eOne. Although there is little reason why NT should not run (other than perhaps the before mentioned video issues), no-one on the eOne mailing list has admitted to actually attempting the install of NT. From the eMachines web site (www.e4me.com) they mention that eTowers from a hardware perspective are capable of running Windows NT but you are on your own for technical support and the drivers are "at your own risk" type of ventures. I would suspect that the eOne is exactly same circumstance, though they don't mention it by name. If you do try to install Windows NT, I would suggest installing more memory (see section 5) in the eOne in order to boost what some have described as "sluggish" performance in low memory cases with NT. It is also suggested that installation be launched from within Win98 in order to "capture" as many of the existing drivers as possible making for an easier installation, as at the time of the writing of this FAQ, it cannot verified the independent existence of NT drivers for the eOne. Video is probably the most important in this aspect. 13. FAQ Caveats, Contributors, Contact Information This FAQ is a simple collation of the best available information at the time of its writing. As with any hardware hacking, we cannot be responsible for the destruction of property, personal injury or liability for any issues that arise as a result of the misuse of this information. Quite simply, if you shock yourself to death, we warned you. If you don't feel comfortable working around electronic equipment, please either do not attempt modifications or please seek the advice of trained personnel. If anyone would like to be added to the eOne mailing list, please email: Linux-eOne-subscribe@onelist.com to join. If anyone would like to suggest changes, add information or otherwise contribute to the eOne FAQ, please email me, Andy Drake (abdrake@gcfn.org). I would like to thank all the people who are on the original eOne mailing list for sending back information, contributing greatly to this FAQ and for your efforts at getting Linux and everything else running on the eOne as a whole. I have kept most of your names out of the FAQ on purpose for privacy, but feel free to email me if you'd like otherwise and I'll be more than happy to include proper credits. For those whom I have freely quoted email, please tell me if you'd like to be mentioned by email address and I'll definitely put you in. As always, this is a work of love, and this FAQ by all means is not exclusively the results of my efforts. Here is a list of informative web sites (in mostly alphabetical order): Be, Inc. (BeOS): www.be.com , free.be.com eMachines, Inc. (eOne, eTowers): www.e4me.com KDS, Inc. (Monitors, internal eOne tube): www.kdscanada.ca/linux.htm Sun Microsystems, Inc.: www.sun.com Xfree86 (X-Window System): www.xfree86.org Miscellaneous Linux information (mostly video stuff): www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/XFree86-HOWTO.html www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO.html www3.cybercities.com/v/vii/programs/linux/read-edid/index.html All trademarks are of their respective owners. The originators and maintainers of this FAQ, the eOneian group or any other parties make no claim to or use these trademarks in any way other than reference for technical documentation purposes