Garin Hiebert
garinh@turkeytrot.dhs.org
November 12, 2000
Disclaimer:
As is usual with these kinds of documents, I make no promises that any of my
advice will work properly on your machine or that it will not cause damage
to your computer. It is in fact very easy to destroy all the data on your
computer using the procedures below.
Features of my Model 6930:
3GB Hard Drive
12.1'' TFT display (800 x 600)
built-in ethernet port
ESS 1879 audio
Intel 266MHz mobile Pentium MMX processor
swappable CD/Floppy
80MB RAM
Introduction:
Since purchasing my Model 6930, there has been quite a bit of develpment in the Linux world. The first installation I did was Red Hat 5.2, which wasn't too difficult but required some tweaking of the initial setup. My most recent installation -- of Mandrake 7.2 -- went much smoother, but still required a little bit of custom scripting.
Contents:
Configuring the BIOS:
I turned on the ``Save to Disk'' feature for APM, disabled PnP, and changed the drive boot order to ``CD-ROM, C, A.''
Configuring Save to Disk:
There are two ways to configure the Save to Disk feature if you wish to
use it -- you can use the Hitachi-supplied PHDISK utility to either set up a file in the Windows 95
drive space on the first partition, or have PHDISK create its own partition.
I have successfully used both methods on my laptop and am currently using a
file on my Windows 95 partition. Whichever option you choose, it is best to
install and test the method before doing the Red Hat installation.
Using the Red Hat 5.2 Installation CD:
The Red Hat installation is normally very easy, but I found that there were partition problems if I used Disk Druid on the laptop. If you persist and use Disk Druid, check to make sure the partitions are set up correctly after installation by comparing the results of a ``df'' and an ``fdisk -l'' command when you get to the command prompt. Also make sure that your swap space is set up -- check with the ``free'' command. In my case, I made it through the partitioning phase by running fdisk instead of Disk Druid, and allocating 1400MB for the root partition and 600MB for my /home partition (the rest is being used by Windows).
The installer correctly probed for the mouse type and detected the C&T 65555 video chipset correctly. You can have the installer probe the display if you wish -- we'll configure X manually later on regardless. I manually selected both 640x480 and 800x600 video modes to be available for both 8-bit and 16-bit color.
The built-in LAN support won't be detected properly, so just select ``no'' when it asks if it should configure LAN support.
I selected ``no'' when asked if the installer should setup a printer.
For LILO configuration, the only change I made to it's reccomendations was to change the DOS partition description to ``Win95.''
Let the machine reboot -- ejecting the CD so that it won't be booted again.
Configuring XFree86:
At the shell prompt, type ``XF86Setup'' to run a XFree86 setup program. It will ask if you want to use existing configuration settings. Things will proceed best if you answer ``no.'' In the setup program, select the following settings:
Mouse -- PS/2, with 3-button emulation (hit ``Apply'' to set) Card -- goto the Card-Type display and select ``C&T 65555'' -- no other settings need to be changed (everything can be probed) Monitor -- select the 800x600 display type ModeSelection -- Select 640x480 and 800x600, 16-bit color
If you save the settings and run ``startx'' you should find that everything works. If you find that the cursor hotspot is in the wrong place or that the display looks really bad, you can either re-try the procedure above or edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config file directly. Try enabling the "sw_cursor" and/or "no-stretch" options.
Building a new Kernel:
If you want APM support and to make your kernel more compact, you should download a new kernel off of a www.kernel.org mirror site. Use the Kernel-HOWTO as a reference for how to proceed. In brief, the steps are:
make menuconfig <-- set your kernel options (see my .config)
make dep
make clean
make zImage
make modules
make modules_install
Copy the new zImage file to the /boot directory and name it whatever you want.
Change /etc/lilo.conf to reflect the new kernel name.
Run lilo to implement the kernel name change.
Note that the kernel size is reduced greatly by not including sound support or building any network drivers into the kernel. If you are going to use a PCMCIA network card and OSS drivers for audio support, this is both efficient and also the right way to set up the kernel.
Now you should find that you have a kernel that is smaller than the original Red Hat kernel and supports the Suspend to Disk feature.
Configuring LAN support:
I wasn't able to get the built-in ethernet to work -- I went out and bought a D-Link DE-660 PCMCIA card to use instead. To get it working, I downloaded the latest PCMCIA code (pcmcia-cs-3.0.9), compiled it, and installed it using the excellent instructions to be found in the PCMCIA-HOWTO.
Configuring Audio support:
I don't have the ESS1879 audio working yet. I downloaded an installer off of the OSS site, ran it, and was happy to see the ESS1879 on the list of supported chips. Unfortunately the drivers don't recognize my chip at all. The best I've been able to do is get some mixer support out of the Sound Blaster Pro driver set.
Concluding Remarks:
With the installation completed as above, my Visionbook Pro works like a
normal Linux workstation, with the added convenience of Save to Disk
functionality. I've since installed KDE and StarOffice using those packages
standard installation procedures.
Red Hat 6.0 Update:
I have since picked up Red Hat 6.0 and for experimental reasons I completely re-did my linux install using the new distribution. I found the experience to be almost exactly the same as before, except that I had to install the XF86Setup RPM off of the CD after the install in order to configure the display the way I wanted. The newer version of XFree86 installed without any of the flakiness of the older revision, however.
After installing the new distribution, I also upgraded to the latest kernel at the time of the upgrade -- 2.2.9. This new kernel promised ESS support. Despite my best efforts, neither the internal networking nor the internal sound seemed to work with this kernel.
ALSA Audio Driver Update:
Audio is now working, using the ALSA drivers available at
www.alsa-project.org. I didn't have to do anything unusual to make these
drivers work -- I just downloaded the latest version and compiled according
to their excellent instructions.
Mandrake 7.2 Update:
With the release of Mandrake 7.2, Linux finally promised me a completely free programming and productivity environment through KDE 2 and all the GNU tools. I had to upgrade right away, so I downloaded the CD images and got to work...
The basic installation proved to be simple. All the hardware except my internal modem, internal networking, and internal audio were automatically detected and configured. I wasn't expecting the internal modem or networking to be detected, since they weren't with earlier Linux installs. Since the audio is an ISA solution, I wasn't expecting it to be detected either, and I haven't tried to make it work yet.
I was very pleased that the video chip was detected and installed correctly, with no complications. No additional download or installation was required to get PCMCIA working either. KDE 2 includes utilities which will monitor your battery power and do other laptop-specific chores for you as well.
The only problem I ran into which required a custom fix was with my PCMCIA network card -- a D-Link DFE-650. I found that when I did a suspend and resume, that the networking was dead. Looking into it, I found that if I restarted the pcmcia system (/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart) that the networking would come back. So, I figured out how to make that happen every time my machine resumed from suspend mode. Simply create the file /etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/apmcontinue as follows:
PROG="$1"
case "$PROG" in
resume )# restart pcmcia system
/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart
;;
Now change the file's permissions so that it will execute -- "chmod 755 apmcontinue" -- and the system should suspend and resume correctly.