I am constantly trying to keep my GNU/Linux Howto and BLOG up-to-date with the latest info; I also answer emails regularly. If I've helped you out and you want to help me out in return, you can donate a couple bucks to help me keep the site up and running - Thanks.
10/100 Ethernet: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter)
(I opted not to get the wireless card) I now use a Belkin F5d6020 wireless B PCMCIA card
SXGA 15in screen with 1400x1050 Max Resolution
Graphics card ATI Mobility [IGP 345M] (It is recognized as a 340M in linux)
56K ALi Corp. Intel 537 [M5457 AC-Link modem]
Sound chip is an ALI 5451
External RGB Monitor output
S-video output
ps/2 port
mic input
headphone output
PCMCIA port (Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC cardbus Controller Rev. 02)
altec lansing builtin stereo speakers
Contact Me
Do you need help setting up linux on this laptop? Drop me an email at mikegmeyers@gmail.com (please don't spam me) Please search my blog before emailing.
What I think of this Laptop....
Pluses
+All hardware I've tried works under linux (I havn't tried Firewire but it was recognized and drivers were available)
+you can turn off the touch pad with a simple button click (I love this feature).
+dimming display function keys work
+ACPI works (under Gentoo, Arklinux, and Mandrake 10.1)
+Hot Keys (including volume control, mute button, and 5 quick buttons) work great with OMKE perl script find this script here It Doesn't work with Mandrake 10.1 though - If you can get it working on Mandrake 10.1 let me know. Minuses
-blue backlit Hotkeys may annoy some people (they don't bother me though)
-gets a little warm on my lap sometimes (CPU runs between 38 C and 59 C) It will run all night at 45 C if it is properly ventilated. It will hit 59 C after about 1hour with semi blocked ventilation. (I leave it on my couch sometimes.)
GENERAL NOTE: - It appears that most linux distribution that use a kernel version released before August 2004 will crash on install during HARDWARE Detection (Arklinux 1.0 and Mandrake 10.1 work great)-- The crashing is due to Firewire kernel issues. Consult your distributions website for info on the boot command to disable Firewire autodetection. -- Gentoo users just select the nohotplug option; or just upgrade to the latest version of your favorite distribution.
NOTES ABOUT INSTALL AND DUAL BOOTING:
I had to FORMAT and repartition the harddrive to install linux. NTFS resize wasn't working for me. Don't worry, this laptop comes with a Windows XP Home Installation CD. IF YOU CHOOSE TO DUAL BOOT, MAKE SURE YOU INSTALL WINDOWS XP FIRST THING AFTER REPARTITIONING.
The best method for installing a dual boot system is to do the following:
1) Erase your partition table with your favorite linux Distribution (I like Mandrake partitioning software best.)
2) Create your new partions including - root (/) At least 4Gigs, swap space the size of your RAM, and leave the remaining space unformated.
3) Save your partition table and reset your computer before installing any GNU/linux software.
4) Put your Windows XP cd in your drive and boot from it.
5) Install Windows on the empty harddrive space.
6) After Windows install is done, put your Linux distribution installer CD back in and reboot.
7) Run the installer and label but don't delete your partions - remember to label your windows partition (/windows).
8) Save your partition table and continue with the GNU/Linux install until it's finished.
9) Reboot and you should have a dual boot Windows/Linux computer.
Linux Distribution specific setup information:
Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community(recommended for most laptop users)
This distribution runs great on this laptop. Everything works perfectly after the autoinstall. I find that Mandrake 10.1 runs the soundcard at the lowest latency of all the distributions I have tried-- so your mp3's don't skip when your browsing the internet. Amarok sound player rocks!!! In addition, I think Mandrake's power management is better than anything I have tried. Also Mandrake provides the 3D-fglx radeon drivers; so 3D acceleration works "out of the box." I also like how Mandrake 10.1 has a network activity and config app right in the taskbar. By default, you can connect to the network with your network cards or your firewire card --neat! Mandrakesoft claims that 10.1 is the most laptop friendly distribution available. I agree, it appears to have tons of wireless drivers supported including centrino. I personally use a Amtel Wireless card and had to download them and build them from source but they work great! I don't know why Mandrakesoft supports tons of wireless PCMCIA cards but doesn't include the sourceforge atmel drivers??? The only thing I don't like about Mandrake 10.1 Community is that you really have to install all 3 CDs if you want things to work right.
Arklinux 1.0 (My favorite Single CD distribution)
Well I have used Gentoo and Mandrake on this laptop and was very satisfied with Gentoo on this laptop; but after a while, I really got sick of compiling everything all the time. I was doing some webbrowsing and found a neat distribution called arklinux (arklinux.org)
about ARKLINUX:
Arklinux uses apt-get for doing updates and installs; so it feels like debian - which I like alot. This Distribution is really designed for Desktop users (though a server addition is coming out in the future.) The Arklinux team has done a great job at creating an easy to use and cutting edge software distribution. Arklinux comes with the latest greatest kernels 2.4.27(default) and 2.6.x(optional), gimp 2.0, kde 3.2.3, and "OutofBOX" DVD playback. This is the first Distribution that didn't need any major changes to make me happy.
For more info check out my BLOG ENTRY HERE
Mandrake 9.2 install (easy and fast install but ACPI is Broken)
Install is seemless except you have to configure the sound card and ACPI support is BROKEN out of the box. (there is no ACPI folder in /proc)
SOUNDCARD CONFIG: Reconfigure soundcard to use the "trident" drivers.
You can do this easily by going into drakconf and selecting the alternate supported driver for your sound card (trident).
Gentoo 1.4 Install (harder and more time consuming Install, but everything works)
I heard great things about Gentoo; and since I couldn't get ACPI working to my liking in Mandrake 9.2, I decided to finally give Gentoo a try. All I have to say is, Gentoo is handsdown the best GNU/linux Distribution for laptops. This laptop flys with prelink and lowlatency in the kernel and a fresh "optimized" build.
How to install Gentoo 1.4:
First Get the latest Gentoo LiveCD, then just follow the Gentoo howto located in the following directory on your LiveCD: /install.txt. Also make sure you read Gentoo online install howto. At first the "install.txt" files looks intimidating but I promise you that if you follow the howto step by step you will have a system up in no time. (get the Live Gentoo CD at one of these mirror servers The relative path is releases/x86/1.4/livecd ):
Starting the computer with LIVECD
Make sure bios is set to boot from CDROM -- Hit F2 when the computer starts to change it. (it is set to boot cdrom by default)
Gentoo will load and prompt you. Type in the following at the prompt: acpi option nohotplug if you don't turn off hotpluging your laptop will freeze.
it will boot the kernel and prompt you, type in the following at the prompt: less /install.txt
Open another terminal by hitting CTL-ALT F2
Go back and forth between each terminal doing as the install.txt file says.
You will notice that your network card doesn't seem to be working
type kudzu at the prompt to install the natsemi network adapter. After it is installed, simply type dhcpcd eth0 to get online.
I would recommend you partition as follows using CFDISK ext2 /boot 100M reiserfs /(root partition) 15G ntfs /mnt/windows (the space that is left over)
My FSTAB -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 1
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs noatime,notail 0 0
/dev/hda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro,user 0 0
# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
# use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
After finishing the howto here are some things you will want to do.
Recompile your kernel with Pentium-4 support, low latency, natsemi network card support, and modular sound for alsa (which gives you better support for the soundcard.)
Compiling the Kernel:
cd /usr/src/linux/
type in: make menuconfig
after saving menuconfig run the following to compile kernel and modules: make dep && clean bzImage modules modules_install
type the following command to move kernel to boot directory: mv /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/
emerge the lilo bootloader with the following command: emerge lilo
Configure lilo conf file: nano -w /etc/lilo.conf
install lilo bootloader with following command: lilo
Sound Configuration
I configured my sound to use ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). I simply followed the instructions located here and had no problems. The module for the sound card is snd-ali5451.
Trackpad setup
The track pad worked fine as a mouse. To get the 'scroll wheel' section of it to work I changed the mouse section of my XF86Config-4 file to:
For the graphics configuration I used a HorizSync of 31.5 - 64.3 and a VertRefresh of 50-70. And you will need to use the radeon driver provided with XFree86. The radeon driver gives you a maximum resolution of 1400x1050. The display is technically capable of 1440x1280 but I use 1280x1024.
WIRELESS HOWTO
Ok I gave in and got a wireless card. I originally got a gigafast 802.11b card but it was glitchy so I ended up getting a linksys which works great.
Wireless card model: Linksys wpc11 v 4 (bestbuy $39.95 as of 12/19/03)
Chipset: realtek 8180
Drivers: available from realtek at realtek.com.tw
install process:
NOTICE: Currently the realtek chipset will only work with linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r9 -- the newer kernel will cause your system to crash when you run: iwpriv wlan0 enable.
el
download redhat 9 drivers
unzip
edit Makefile so that it points and the correct kernel src directory
from "release" directory type: make
insmod rtl*.o
run the following command:
run iwpriv wlan0 enable: you should see some blinking now.
dhcpcd wlan0
If all that worked than you should be up and running!
NEWER WIRELESS CARD
I got sick of the "off and on" functionality of the realtek 8180 chipset so I finally settled on a Belkin F5D6020 ver.2. This card uses the atmel opensource drivers and works great with the 2.4 kernels - no luck with 2.6 yet.
This card can commonly be found at Circuit City for about $49.00.
