Contents

Introduction

For the most part everything I have tried on this model works with Linux. But I now regret that choice due to a hardware glitch that often renders the computer unusable with its built-in screen in any OS. The problem can best be described as random horizontal pixel shift. It was supposedly "fixed" under warranty, but has cropped up again now that the warranty ran out. It is entirely random and there is nothing I can do to specifically cause it or cure it when it happens. It is just a hardware problem with the built-in screen and does NOT affect external monitor or remote VNC connection (Win98se or Linux). I have had contact from others with the same problem. If anyone has found a cure or if this screen problem persists in newer models, I would be interested in hearing about it. A possible solution is here.

These models appear to use the same NeoMagic Magic Media 256AV 128 bit 2.5 meg video used on earlier PCG-F series. I also include some newsgroup info about the NeoMagic 256XL 6 meg video used on F480/F490. F4xx models use Yamaha DS-XG sound instead of the NM256 sound that was used in PCG-F3xx and earlier models. The F430/F450 come standard with 64 meg RAM, 14.1" TFT 1024x768 display, DVD/CD and removable floppy drive which can be replaced with a weight saver or second battery. I got the F450 with extra drive space for Linux and digital camera/camcorder data.  I added 128 meg RAM to bring it up to 192 meg.  I didn't think I needed that much (until I installed Mandrake 7.0 with KDE) but it was reasonably priced at http://www.crucial.com/ and Linux tends to keep things in memory if the memory is available, so maybe that is why it appears to be using more.

The standard hard drive on the F450 is 9 G split into 2 partitions of approximately 5 G and 3.5 G with the 2nd empty partition intended for multimedia storage.  Standard drive on the F430 is 6 G. The split partitions made it easy to add Linux without having to repartition Win98, unless you have the smaller drive and need more space for Linux.

Disclaimer

If installing RedHat or related Linux, pay particular attention to documentation about Server or Workgroup installation and disk partitioning. This may apply to other Linux distributions as well. Making the wrong selection may completely overwrite your current operating system or render it unbootable.

Boot Images

cp filename.img /dev/fd0

Or some people like to use dd for that. Otherwise you will need to boot to DOS, preferably from a boot floppy (not DOS window or reboot to DOS) and use rawrite.exe (see docs for instructions). You will need to boot with CD-ROM support if you want to get rawrite from the CD.

For other distributions you may be able to boot directly to the CD or use autoboot.bat on the CD to boot into Linux setup.

Note: Mandrake 7.0 says to use its boot floppy if installing along with another OS but the boot floppy received in my Macmillan package was defective. Autoboot.bat on the CD did not work from DOS like it does for regular RedHat. After I made another boot floppy with the cdrom.img from the CD I discovered that the CD has to either be already in the drive when booting or quickly inserted at the boot: prompt, otherwise install will fail to find the CD. This is because the kernel automatically tries to mount the CD while it boots, and if not found in the drive, will not try that drive again. I have not tried directly booting from the Mandrake CD by setting it as the boot drive.

One other strange thing about Mandrake is that the extra vt's during install only show status or error messages. There is no vt with a shell prompt for doing anything manually. This appears to make it more difficult to use the boot image to repair things. Also the Server install has minimal programs. I initially chose Custom, Server install with Gnome and without KDE, but it didn't install either. Since the Macmillan book did not even mention Gnome, I reinstalled using Custom, Normal which consumes over 1 G of disk space, not including any kernel sources or compiler.

Before you begin

From DOS FDISK remove the empty logical drive D: and the extended partition, exit FDISK then reboot or shut down (press the ON button for more than 4 seconds). If you need more room you will need to completely defragment your Win98 drive, disable virtual memory and use something like FIPS, per its docs, to reduce the size of the partition.  FIPS is on the RedHat CD. Note that disk partitioning software may not actually reformat the reduced partition or change the block size, it just marks the reduced portion as not available, so your OS may still show the original size with less free space.

For RedHat 6.1 or any version that requires boot image updates, boot into CMOS setup and move the CD-ROM down to last in the boot order, or it will try to boot from the Linux CD which would not allow you to use the updates. In fact, remove the CD entirely from the drive when booting, otherwise the updated boot image seems to hang looking for old drivers on the CD instead of updates floppy. Likewise do NOT run autoboot.bat to start the installation for the same reason, unless using another distribution that does not require boot image updates.

You should also make sure that you read 'info mknod' and /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt if you want to customize your partitions with fdisk, so you know how to create /dev/hda (I will tell you below).

Disk Druid is somewhat inflexible and may not partition things the way you want them. For example it tends to lump all partitions it makes into one extended partition that consumes the remainder of the disk. This makes it impossible to follow the RedHat instructions to add a primary /boot sector in Disk Druid after creating a /swap partition. If you need a boot partition due to 1024 cyl limitation of previous LILO versions, you might try making a primary /boot partition FIRST. There is a new LILO without the 1024 cyl limit, but it may not be available in distributions yet. The installation image includes Linux fdisk, but no devices to use it on. So read 'info mknod' and /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt, and I will tell you how to use that to create /dev/hda below.

Installation

Boot from the boot image floppy you created earlier. For RH6.1 at the you will need to tell it to use the updates, but do NOT insert the updates floppy until it asks for it later.

boot: linux updates

Follow on screen instructions. When it asks about the mouse you probably want to select 2 button PS/2 mouse and click the 'Emulate 3-button mouse' button. Click next and then pause to read the following:

Review how you want to partition the rest of the drive. For a drive with more than 1023 cylinders (about 8.4 G in LBA mode) you will need a /boot partition, not more than about 16 meg, completely under cyl 1024. This is not necessary with the 6 G drive, but the 9 G drive is 1099 cylinders. Since Disk Druid never does things the way I want them done, I switched to the 2nd virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and created /dev/hda like this:

mknod /dev/hda b 3 0
fdisk /dev/hda

Then I ran fdisk to set my partitions up like the following.  You may want to size these differently or use additional partitions for things like /var. Make sure you set the extended partition to type f if it will contain a FAT32 logical drive. Note that there can be up to 4 primary partitions. Logical partitions in an extended partition begin with hda5. The logical FAT32 partition (D:) was created and formatted later with DOS FDISK.  I have since made the swap partition now that I have 192 meg RAM in case I want to try a program that can hyberinate to swap. And I may rethink the partitioning since Mandrake with KDE uses considerably more space than RedHat with Gnome:

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1099 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             1       653   5245191    b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2   *       654       655     16065   83  Linux /boot LILO
/dev/hda3           656      1099   3566430    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5           656       872   1743021   83  Linux /
/dev/hda6           873       881     72261   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7           882      1099   1751053+   b  Win95 FAT32

I put LILO on /dev/hda2 so I don't have to worry about Win98 updates or virus checkers messing with the MBR. Initially hda1 will be the boot partition, but you can change that to hda2 from DOS or Linux fdisk once you get LILO installed on it. F4xx models do not have phdisk.exe or the /dev/hda4 mentioned for hyberination of earlier Sony models. Win98se docs say that hyberinate does not work with FAT32, but Sony has a special Win program to hyberinate to a file instead. Apparently the new ACPI works somewhat differently than APM. For another reason to put LILO on a partition instead of the MBR, see APM below.

Then you can resume setup by using Alt-F7 to get back to GUI installation, or Alt-F1 if using text based installation. I originally forgot to make my swap partition, but Disk Druid can handle that.  It just has trouble making a primary /boot partition if it does not already exist.

It is usually best to select Custom setup and "I want to select all packages". Just be careful about backing up during the install. If you back up too far, almost all of the default and selected packages will be unselected, including major and essential packages. After you select all the packages you want, it will take under 15 minutes to install them from the CD.

I recently installed SuSE 7.1 workstation with kernel 2.4.0 to try out some of the new kernel features and somewhat enlarged the Linux partitions, since the base installation is 1.5 GB. More about that later.

Video

To use X with an external monitor, either or both of 2 options can be added to /etc/X11/XF86Config.  I cannot find a full explaination of this or how to set this up dynamically with a startx commandline option, but these worked in the "Device" section, and likely also works in the "Screen" section, if you selectively uncomment the one(s) you want to use at the time.  Note that intern_disp is the default, so you do not need to specify it unless using both internal and external displays.

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "NeoMagic (laptop/notebook)"
    VendorName  "Unknown"
    BoardName   "Unknown"
#    VideoRam    2496

# LCD screen (default), uncomment to use both internal and external
    Option      "intern_disp"
# VGA port, uncomment to use external monitor
#    Option      "extern_disp"

    # Clock lines

EndSection

Note: NeoMagic 256XL 6 meg video in F480/F490 and other top end models may not recognized by X servers at this time, but should work with some manual configuration. A quick search of deja found this regarding F490 from comp.os.linux.portable:

I got this from one of the laptop pages, but I can't remember which one,
so I can't credit it properly.  But the fix to get X working is (luckily)
extremly simple:

Run Xconfigurator; pick "NeoMagic" for the driver and "LCD Panel 1024x768"
for the monitor.  Pick 4mb of VRAM (even  though it really has 6) and No
Clockchip.  Don't bother to probe or test; it will fail.  Allow it to save
the settings.

Then edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config file, and make two minor edits under
the section titled "Device":

1.  Uncomment the VideoRam 4096 line;
2.  Uncomment and change the Chipset setting from "NM2160" to "NM2200".

Save and startx, and away you go!

I have also heard of adding frame buffer support to the kernel and using the FB server for the F480.  More details when available.

DVD/CD-ROM

I am looking into DVD support. Mandrake 7.0 came with something called nist for playing DVD, but incomplete instructions. From looking at the May 2000 DVD-Playing-HOWTO, I installed a generic 2.2.15 kernel, patched it for DVD support and recompiled pcmcia modules from the existing package. I was able to compile the latest ac3dec and mpeg2dec utilities and oms player from the LiViD. The DVD player comes up, I can get a playlist. When I hit the play button, it begins playing excellent sound from the DVD, but no video ("can't open /dev/mga_vid" which does exist). As near as I can tell mga_vid is only for Matrox video cards. Until this is sorted out I will keep the dual boot because DVD plays well in Win98 at 1024x768 16-bit color.

Networking

I chose a Netgear FA510C 10/100 cardbus pcmcia nic, since Netgear indicates Linux support and was reasonably priced. You do not need any extra software for it since it will automatically be recognized by the pcmcia driver. To connect directly to another computer without a hub, you will need a crossover cable instead of the patch cable that comes with it. Between this and a FA310TX on my PC at 100 full duplex, the 4.6-5 MB/sec hd on the old PC is the only transfer rate limit (transfer from cache has been over 7 MB/sec).

Networking is fairly straightforward on the notebook, with a pcmcia card. Simply insert the FA510C (it should beep twice) then go to netcfg in X or linuxconf in the console as root to edit the eth0 parameters. In the future all you have to do is insert the card to bring up networking with the same parameters. You probably want to delete the default route and add a default route to your gateway machine for internet access.

route del default
route add default gw 192.168.1.1 (use real IP or name of gateway PC or router)

Installing the FA310TX on my PC was just as easy, kudzu recognized the card during boot and added the alias eth0 tulip in /etc/conf.modules. All I had to do was use netcfg to configure the IP. It is best to delete the default route before using pppd (or from /etc/rc.d/rc.local). With ipchains MASQ and a caching name server set up per DNS-HOWTO, everything ran smoothly from the LAN.

Note: Due to the built-in controllerless modem, you may want to consider a combination pcmcia network/modem card. Just beware of 3Com pcmcia Winmodems and other controllerless modems.

Modem

I purchased a Zoom 2975 pccard modem which I thought would work out of the box, since it is a real modem (Lucent chipset). Apparently the pcmcia-cs-3.1.9 modules had trouble setting the irq properly. The modem would not work unless I used setserial to set the irq to zero (polled mode) which worked, but was somewhat slower than normal. I updated to pcmcia-cs-3.1.16, along with security update of the kernel to 2.2.16, and now the modem works fine with an irq.

IrDA

/bin/setserial -v /dev/ttyS2 port 0x03e8 irq 10 ^auto_irq ^skip_test autoconfig

After this setserial -a /dev/ttyS2 should show:

/dev/ttyS2, Line 2, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x03e8, IRQ: 10
Baud_base: 115200, close_delay: 50, divisor: 0
closing_wait: 3000, closing_wait2: infinte
Flags: spd_normal

Sound

Open Sound System for a fee, supports the Yamaha YMF-744. You need the OSS YMH option. I also got the OSS soft mixer option, but that might only be needed if you want to blend multiple sound sources for recording. You must disable PNP in CMOS setup for this to work properly, but that does not affect PNP recognition of devices during boot and so far has not affected Win98. These drivers install easily and sounds all work great, except the OSS mplay cannot access the DS-XG wave tables, so it requires software wave tables or timidity. Or you can simply use playmidi which synthesizes midi through the sequencer (opl3).

Alsa finally has support for Yamaha sound chips. Release 0.5.8b is out with a ymfpci module. It is some more complicated than OSS sound.  Like other pci sound, you should disable PNP in CMOS setup. I have not gotten playmidi to work with opl3 (which I think is the sequencer) even though the Alsa driver was configured --with-sequencer=yes and the snd-opl3 module is loaded. You will need the Alsa driver, lib and utils packages which I dumped into /usr/src/alsa.

In alsa-driver dir:

./configure --with-sequencer=yes --with-debug=detect --with-cards=ymfpci
make install

If you later want to revise this, after the new configure, do make clean, make, make install.

In each of alsa-lib dir and alsa-utils:

./configure
make install

If you later want to revise something, you probably want to make clean, configure and then make and make install. If you try to recompile alsa-lib by using make install without doing make first, it seems to fail.

/etc/conf.modules

# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-ymfpci
# not sure if following does anything, sequencer does not work with or without it
options snd-card-ymfpci snd_fm_port=0x388

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Note: After modprobe snd-card-0, you will need to use a mixer (alsamixer or other) to unmute various channels before you will hear any sounds. The Alsa oss devices may not show up in lsmod or cat /proc/asound/sndstat until you play sounds that use oss devices.  Example of /proc/asound/sndstat after playing a .wav file:

Sound Driver:3.8.1a-980706 (ALSA v0.5.8b emulation code)
Kernel: Linux laptop.localdomain 2.2.16 #6 Thu Jun 29 23:52:12 CDT 2000 i686
Config options: 0

Installed drivers:
Type 10: ALSA emulation

Card config:
Yamaha DS-XG PCI (YMF744) at 0xfedf8000, irq 9

Audio devices:
0: YMFPCI (DUPLEX)

Synth devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Midi devices:
0: MPU-401 (UART)

Timers:
7: system timer

Mixers:
0: Asahi Kasei AK4543

I have to read up on Linux sound to see if synth, sequencer, fm and opl3 are all related. Opl3 does not seem to work with the Alsa snd-opl3 module even though it was configured --with-sequencer=yes.

Standard Linux Modules can play some sound using the legacy SB Pro compatible mode which can be used by manually adding the following to /etc/conf.modules. But it is only recognized as 8-bit sound despite any attempted dma16 settings:

alias char-major-14 sb
post-install sb /sbin/modprobe "-k" "opl3"
options opl3 io=0x388
options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 mpu_io=0x330

With sb and opl3 the playmidi command works fine with midi files, and play can play .au and some .wav files, but not 16 bit .wav files. The esound driver of gnome and music CDs do not work with this set up as 8 bit sb.

APM

As far as hot keys, Fn-Esc (suspend) and Fn-F12 (hyberinate) both put it into deep suspend. Fn-D (display off) and Fn-S (idle standby) do not work. It may be best to use cardctl eject for any pcmcia network card, since the network may not be restored properly when it wakes up, and the system may lock up totally. Also do not suspend while X is running because that will lock up your system, so you probably want to boot into runlevel 3 (console) instead of runlevel 5 (xdm). There is probably a way around this, but I did not grab the news posts about this. I will try the acpid program in the future to see if that supports more modes. Pressing any key on the keyboard (not the mousepad) wakes it up.

Note: You may want to disable pcmcia cards before using suspend or possibly disable USB (see next section) if you have trouble with lockup when it wakes up. In particular network cards may not be restored properly. See the eject option in man cardctl.

2.3.x development kernels do have ACPI support, but I did not have 2.3.99-pre9 installed long enough to check it out because I would have had to update other things. These kernels also appear to have built-in pcmcia support which seemed to be conflicting with my existing cardmgr and pcmcia setup.

Note about Win98se hybirination: Since Win98se hybirinates to the FAT32 file system instead of a separate dedicated partion, it apparently only works if Win98 (or BIOS?) knows that it was booted directly to Win98 (without LILO). If you attempt to hybirinate and the amber LED is still blinking, you are actually in suspend. This is an additional reason (besides getting stepped on by Win98 updates or a virus checker) to put LILO on a primary Linux partiton instead of the MBR. If you know you will be rebooting Win98 and need the hybirination feature, you can use Linux fdisk to toggle the Win98 partition as active and toggle that off for the LILO partiton. Alternately to switch it automatically while cold booting you could have an alternate /etc/lilo.conf entry to switch the boot to Win instead of LILO:

other=/dev/hda1
        label=windows
        table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/hda1
        label=winboot
        table=/dev/hda
        change
          partition=/dev/hda1
            activate
          partition=/dev/hda2
            deactivate

Hybirination will still not work until you reboot Win98se. Win98 will remain the primary boot until you use DOS(Win) FDISK to set the active boot partition back to LILO.

Other Features

If you want to display more information on your console you can compile framebuffer support into the kernel and add a vga=791 line to your lilo.conf to give you a 48 row, 128 column screen with a smoother font.  If you are not certain that you did this properly, duplicate your current Linux boot section in lilo.conf and give it a different name with the added vga line. Some people with newer unsupported video cards successfully used the frame buffer X server.

Win98 lists USB as an Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller and USB Root Hub for 2 ports.  I recently purchased a slim portable VST CD-R/W USB Drive. I can read data CD's, but have not tried writing them yet, details here.

The Sony iLINK (1394) Adapter appears disabled in Win98 by default. Although, there is also a Sony CXD 3222A OHCI iLINK (IEEE 1394) PCI Host Controller using irq 9 memory ranges 80000000-800007ff and 80000800-800009ff. I don't know if the latter is DV (video) and the former is PC to PC or if the latter is a substitute for the former. There is ongoing development of 1394 support in Linux, also known by the Apple trademark, FireWire. I do have a Sony Camcorder with DV connection, so I will check into this in the future.

2.4.x kernels have more support for ACPI, USB and IEEE 1394.

Notes

Links

Linux Laptop Home Page
Linux Organization
Open Sound System
Alsa Sound
Linmodems
Sony Notebook Computers
VST Technologies (USB and IEEE 1394 drives)