Linux on a LiteLine Laptop

So this is my small contribution to Linux on Laptops. The latter is a collection about everything which might be interesting for those wanting to use their laptop with linux. Thanks for this site!

You might want to take a look at tuxmobile, too.

Not everything is configured on the system, so this page is in progress, too. When things are done, I'll try to put every little bit of information on this page. If you think something is missing, tell me about it.

I installed linux on the following laptop:

It was sold as a fujitsu/siemens LiteLine. Some data: 800x600 DSTN-display, with 2MB video-RAM, controller is a Trident 9385. K6-2 with 400 MHz, 96 MB of RAM, 4.3 GB HD, 24x CDROM, floppy-disk. Sound is provided by "ESS 1869", the PCMCIA-controller is a Texas Instruments PCI-1225. A "synaptics" touch-pad is the pointing device. There are several interfaces to the outside world. It's a pretty heavy device (3.3 kg, says the manual). It was manufactured by mitac, model "5033".

partitioning

It came with two partitions, a big one for windows 98 and a smaller one for "suspend to disk". I turned off win98's "virtual memory" and made a defragmentation, then used fips to make the win-partition smaller (Don't forget to reenable "virtual memory" afterwards.).

On my previous (desktop-)systems I always had several partitions for "/home", "/", "/usr" and swap. As the laptop's harddisk is not that big, I didn't want to waste space and just made a "/boot"-partition for the kernel and a "/"-partition (using reiserfs) for the rest. By the way, the first time I used reiserfs. I'll see how well it performs.

installation

I installed SuSE Linux 6.4 from CD. This is nothing to talk about...

configuring the hardware

soundcard

OSS-driver for soundblaster
Well, at first it really was that easy. I just compiled SB-support into the kernel, using irq and dma like windows did and it worked. After some days I recognized that sound is disfunctional :-(
Bringing it up again has really been some work. It ended up like this:
I used the same kernel-sounddriver, but as a module. Furthermore I had to use isapnp (never did this before). I enabled PnP in the kernel, too, but don't know if this is necessary or if it has anything to do with isapnp. The docs I found on this topic were kind of confusing. Now it works...haven't experienced such ugly behaviour with linux before.....

Here's what I think is important in /etc/modules.conf:

alias char-major-14 sb
post-install sb /sbin/modprobe "-k" "adlib_card"
options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330 esstype=1869
options adlib_card io=0x388
options sound dmabuf=1

touchpad

it just worked (PS/2)...

pcmcia (10MBit ethernet)

I did nothing except plugging the card into the slot and it worked ;-) It is sold as "4lan pcmcia ethernet adapter"; in the manual it is said to be ne2000-compatible and it is also referred to as "EP100".

The driver is..well don't know, I just plugged in the card and it worked... my "messages" log says:

insmod ...8390.o
insmod ...pcnet_cs.o

"cardctl ident" says

product info: "Ethernet", "Adapter", "2.0"
manfid: 0x0149, 0xc1ab
function: 6 (network)

graphics

Be careful! If your display is not controlled the right way, you'll see bright horizontal lines on the screen which will not disappear if this state takes too long. You display will be damaged! As far as I know, this applies to all LCDs.

The only problems that I encountered had to do with X11...Well, I didn't really check it out, but at least I think that I ran into trouble because gpm was up and running. I'm not satisfied with what I got now. Framebuffer didn't work as I expected it, too. So I'll have to work on this...
Well, it seems I nearly got it. Using XFree 4.0 I get an accelerated screen at up to 16bpp at the moment. So what's still missing is: 24bpp plus the solution of a new problem: When XFree86 4.0 is up, you can't change the contrast of the display anymore. You always have to switch to a console, change contrast and switch back.
XFree 3.3.5/3.3.6 only provides an unaccelerated server, but up to 24bpp (yes, says it, but it looks like 16bpp). Using the same config with the server of 3.3.4, you get it accelerated at 8bpp, but this is awful....however, Alessandro Tommasi reported that for him it is also accelerated at 16bpp.

Configuration of XFree 4.0

As stated above, I'm running SuSE 6.4 on the laptop. This distribution includes XFree 4.0 and a tool called "sax2" to configure it. The latter did completely fail, so it was RTFM-time again. "XFree86 -configure" provided a basic configuration which I filled up with things from the 3.3.X-config. A bit of fiddling around and I got a running server. I'll have to finish the setup, then you'll be able to read more about it...

27.08.2000: Added support for external mouse. You can use the serial mouse (if plugged in) AND the touchpad.

News/History

02.01.2008:	Included a link to tuxmobile.
22.03.2005:	X11 works with 24bpp using the vesa driver without errors, but it is not accelerated. However, it seems faster than the non-accelerated trident driver. man 5 XF86Config told me that it is possible to disable specific parts of the acceleration. Using Option "XaaNoScreenToScreenCopy" "on" is needed to make the graphic errors disappear. Of course scrolling (for example in the web browser) is really slow now, vesa feels faster.
11.03.2005:	Just installed debian sarge. Automatic configuration of X11 works, but shows the same errors I have had since a long time (driver trident). They are not present without acceleration (Option "NoAccel" "true"). I'm using kernel 2.6.8. The sound module to be loaded is snd-es18xx.ko. All the rest does work out of the box. The kernel config can be found below.
03.12.2002:	Using kernel 2.4.20.
27.05.2001:	Using kernel 2.4.5
02.03.2001:	I have installed SuSE 7.1 with kernel 2.4.1 and a new version of XFree. Don't know why, but I had to change the config of XFree...you'll find the new files below.

useful programs

sync data between laptop and home-pc: rsync. It is really fast even in syncing large directories containing lots of data in few files (graphics) and very small files (my messagebase), too.

configuration files

XF86Config

XFree 3.3.X
XFree 4.0
XFree 4.0.2

kernel configuration

I am running kernel 2.4.5. Here's the .config-file.
Config for 2.2.16 (SuSE)
USB and IrDA are disabled in both configs.
.config-file 2.4.20.
.config-file 2.6.8-debian.