The Laptop

Model
R40 2897GWU
CPU
Pentium M 1.5Mhz
RAM
768 M DDR SDRAM (2G Max)
Cache
1 M L2
Drive
60G EIDE
Display
15.1" TFT 1400x1050, ATU Radeon Mobility M7 LW [7500]
Ethernet
Intel 82801BD PRO/100 VE
Atheros AR5211 802.11ab NIC wireless
Sound
Intel 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller
Owner
Steven Pav, Humanoid, spav@ucsd.edu.

Links

The linux-on-laptop site has links to many people who have put Linux on an R40. When I first installed SuSE, I took clues from the following: Now I am more interested in the following:

Changes

The laptop had been working pretty much fine under SuSE 9.0. There were some problems, however, most notably getting the wireless to detect networks. Part of this is a human issue of me now knowing how to configure things. The other problem is that I seriously misestimated which partitions I would need, and how large they should be. Thus I was in a situation where I could not do upgrades because /usr was full. Moreover, installing new software with RPM is pretty useless. The SuSE model appears to be that you purchase a new set of CDs every year (At 80 bucks a shot). I wanted a package manager that would work over the internet, so I went for Gentoo Linux.

Install and Maintenance Log

2005.05.25
After copying any needed data onto CDs and to my work computer, I inserted the Gentoo Linux 2005.0 for Pentium 4 CD and tried a "stage 3" install. I mostly followwed directions from the gentoo 2005.0 x86 Handbook.

I partitioned my drive with suggestions from the *nix partition guide. What I did not realize when I did this is that the directions in the Gentoo handbook were for a single root partition. Thus I missed out some things the first two attempts. Funny things happened because I had put everything into what I wanted to be /var, then compiled the kernel, put it into /boot (probably did that correctly), then configged grub, rebooted and got kernel panic. it could not find any of the stuff it needed to. This is because all of / was dumped into /var and so the filesystem was screwy.

2005.05.26
I figured out the above problem with disc mounting and followed the directions of the installation guide but mounting the discs correctly: 
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda7 /mnt/gentoo
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda2 /mnt/gentoo/usr
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda4 /mnt/gentoo/var
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda6 /mnt/gentoo/tmp
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda8 /mnt/gentoo/usr/local
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda10 /mnt/gentoo/home
Once this was done, and I figured out how to configure grub correctly (make sure it knows where / is supposed to be...), I got it to reboot without panic. Which dropped me into a terminal as root. ok. deep breath.

Per guide directions I did an emerge kde from the second CD. It took a while, but no problemo. Other than that I do not know how to start kde. Took a little while to figure out to put 

startkde
into my .xinitrc file. (Not sure if that is really the right way to do things, but it does work.) I played with kde for a while then took the laptop to work with me. I wanted to get the networking working, which meant trying to hook it up to ethernet and/or the wireless.

I forgot to bring the power cables. This means I had perhaps two hours to do things. I booted up with fingers crossed and ethernet cable firmly inplugged, but no dice. oh well. I shot a message over to math sysadmin and shutdown the laptop to conserve battery. Started editing this webpage again...

2005.05.27
I can learn more than I knew before by doing 
cat proc/pci | less
I am recompiling the kernel, and trying to figure out what the boot process is really like. Currently the ethernet controller does not like to start. I am not sure if this is a kernel problem or a configuration problem.

Ahha. I figured out that I want to add support for the e100 module. Then I put a line in /etc/modules.conf that says 

alias eth0 e100
Then I load it with modprobe eth0, and run dhcpcd. Now ping works. cool. Let's get into trouble...

And the sound is somehow working as well. Why, I am not sure. I suppose I modprobed the right thing. This is not to say that alsa is installed. At least, I do not think so.

I try to get wireless working, which requires a reboot after a build, and now eth0 is not working. hmmmm. Not sure what I did there. All the steps above do not seem to work. Bummer. Ok. Now eth0 is back. It turns out I have to be careful what flags i give to dhcpcd. Not sure how that works. It resets my hostname. OK. when I try to install the wireless wrappers, it chokes up. I will let that go for a while while i emerge gnome and get my preferred apps onto the machine.

It seems the network keeps going up and down. Not sure if that's my fault or what.

2005.06.08
I think my problem with eth0 was a bad wire. I will investigate that again later in the week. Meanwhile, I have figured out how to get ndiswrapper working for my wireless. it can be as simple as 
emerge wireless-tools ndiswrapper
then follow some directions from siprell.com page. In particular, I took the /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 file from that page, and made whatever modifications were necessary. In particular, I added 
/usr/sbin/iwconfig ${IFACE} mode Managed
/usr/sbin/iwconfig ${IFACE} ESSID default
this works for me and my wireless at home. There are actually a number of wireless access points that I can reach from my apartment, but only one of them is open for my use; only after experimenting was I able to set the ESSID correctly to reach the open router. Ok.

The gentoo ndiswrapper howto was also critical for me. FWIW, i recall my pciid was 168C:0012, and i installed the orinoco 8461 blah blah blah driver from the supported cards page. That is, without WPA. I may try WPA later.

I then ran into some serious problems regarding ALSA crashing X hard. I don't know the vocab well, but it crashed it such that I could only deal by power switching off. This seemed to only happen when I was using xmms and firefox simultaneously. As if the two were competing for sound. I browsed the gentoo forums and found something regarding alsa segfault, which is evidently a memory access problem. There was some advice regarding masking out newer versions of alsa (huh?), which I tried, then found later, better advice, about updating kernel sources. Since I had level 3 installed from disks and had the 2.6.11-r3 source, and 2.6.11-r9 was current, and supposedly had a fix for alsa segfault, I then went and updated that, recompiled the kernel. While I was at it, I did an 

emerge --update world
which consumed about 12 hours overnight. OK. I want to be more careful about that one, I think. ALSA seems to be working OK now. We will see. This was also when I found out about etc-update. After a big emerge, you can run 
etc-update
and it will help you figure out your configure scripts in /etc/. Not bad.

Old Version

Works

The CDROM works fine per SuSE 9.0 install.
The CD-W also works fine, using K3b installed by SuSE 9.0.
The ethernet card worked out of the (SuSE) box, but I needed to get all those numbers and codes from the system administrator. mea culpa for waiting too long on that. Once these were all straightened out, it plugs nicely into the wall at work. good
Built in wireless. The driver appears to have been part of the SuSE install. I used the YaST2 network devices to set the thing up. Again this was a matter of getting all the numbers right. My sysadmin helped. I also got help from my neighbor, Falk, who has wireless setup on his laptop. I use his wireless at home. He showed me how to use the 'route' command, to get things going through my wlan0. I need to set this up as a start up script. Thanks, Falk.
DVD playing: set the IDE DMA on, and it works like a charm.

Needs Work

I am not sure if I am running the screen at the right frequencies. It looks ok, but maybe it could look better.

Does Not Work Yet

APM. I have to learn how to rebuild the kernel and reinstall.
Modem. I installed two different drivers, and neither of them seems to work. my big problem appears to be my provider, which, according to the settings on my old laptop, wanted me to use a SLIP connection. Since I now have wireless at home, it doesn't seem to be such a big deal.

Install and Maintenance Log

12/17/2003: Fedex left the laptop outside my door. No signature required? thanks. I unpacked the system and just looked at it for a while.

I had, I thought, prepared a Knoppix bootable CD earlier at work. Because I don't have root access to my shuttle I could not burn this CD on a non-braindead system. The 45 minutes of frustration with windows XP convinced me that I emphatically do not want a dual boot machine. I put the Knoppix CD in the drive (requires a pin if the system is off), and turned the computer on. I did not realize I had to press the "Access IBM" button while booting, so it went into the Windows XP thing where it changed the FAT to the NTFS. Whatever. I turned the computer off the hard way, and used the "Predesktop" to try to boot from CD. The Knoppix CD is hosed, and I do not know why. My guess is that Windows XP really does suck, and I do not care.

12/18/2003: Brought the laptop to work. I wanted to get the most out of the harddrive, which means getting rid of the hidden crap: the install CDs for Windows XP are lurking at the very end of the harddrive. I went through "Access IBM" to the Security Options and Disabled the Pre Desktop whatever. I learned this trick from the beezmo page. This essentially makes, I believe, the entire harddrive visible to the Linux installer. Then I put the SuSE 9.0 Pro CD in, set it to boot from CD and turned it on. Actually, that's not what I did, I actually screwed up a few times, turning the damn thing on and off with the power button, forgetting something here and there until finally I had essentially booted from the CD.

I then had to decide on how to partition the drive. I thought about this for a while, then realized I have no idea what I am doing. I did want a bit of swap space, and also a few partitions that are the size of a CD, which will make backup to CD more sane, or so I thought. I looked at some webpages: there's a little something about partitioning at Linux Magazine, and some notes about journaling file systems. I decided on a few partitions and I opted for the Reiser FS. The SuSE installer would have defaulted to Reiser anyway, which shows you that I'm dumber than a CD. Thanks, college!

I goofed up by clicking on the software thingy and choosing my software before choosing the partitioning strategy. Dumb. Actually, you kind of want to do the two things together, but SuSE doesn't play that. So I wasted a lot of time optimizing my software picks, only to have them discarded because it didn't like my partitioning. On the second (or was it third?) time around, I managed to get it right, but I realized I have enough disk space and so I chose a fat install. I clicked OK and ate some fruit. SuSE did its work for a bit. At this point, I would like to interject that I'm happy with SuSE on my shuttle at work, although some of the applications think I understand German. And you get a free little chameleon sticker with your 80 dollar purchase. How cool is that?

The install chugged away for a while. I had to stay to swap CDs now and then. Otherwise I would have gone and gotten a proper lunch. I started this webpage. I found the linux-on-laptop page useful, at least psychologically, when making the decision to buy a laptop, so I wanted to give something back. Nothing given back yet, it seems. SuSE installer is chugging away.

I peeled off the "Designed for Windows XP" sticker and put it on my trashcan. Unfortunately there's not enough stick on the sticker. Probably they are trying to discourage bootleggers somehow by making these things non-reuseable. Between disc 3 and disc 4, some guy came to my office looking for a machine perception lab. Whatever.

I let the installer lead the way on the network installation. The wireless did not pick up. Evidently I do not have the drivers? I have a PCMCIA wireless card at home which I will try. I went and got lunch and a bird crapped on me. I came back to fight with the XP machine to get a decent CD burn for once. I think it worked this time. Without any networking up I have to rely on the "sneakernet."

Our sysadmin kinda grad student, Josh, tried to figure out cd burning on my shuttle to make the sneakernet run faster. He could not get this working, so I told him it's probably best to wait until 9.0 has been installed on the shuttle. I'm leaving tomorrow for Oakland anyway. No biggie.

Later I got the thing home and tried to watch "genghis blues," which I borrowed from the public library. No dice: kaffeine/xine is lame. So much for watching movies over vacation. Also tried my Lucent PCMCIA wireless card. I'm evidently not smart enough to operate a computer.

12/21/2003: Went to my friend's place and begged him to download and burn me vlan or ogle to watch movies. I have no network connection atall, so I have to resort to sneakernet. Pooh. He recently put an extra harddrive in his Mac, and his CD burner is not working. After putzing with it for an hour, still no dice. And yes, I am glad I didn't buy a powerbook, thank you.

01/05/2004: Trying to download stuff to get some connection up. First I will try to get the modem running. I went to linmodems.org and downloaded the scanModem tool.

Per Beezmo's excellent suggestion, I toodled over to the linux drivers at ibm. Hmmm. I downloaded the agere modem packages, and then a whole bunch of wireless drivers, as I was not sure what's in my computer. duh! Put all these in one package, and then I have to go teach calculus. sheet.

After class I tried to get this stuff on a CD using the XP machines in the lab. I was perplexed by beezmo's suggestions to look for files w70n51.etc, as they did not seem to be present, even after executing all three executables on the web page. huh. At this point the local network goes to shit, and I cannot access the IBM webpage, or even yahoo. In my mind I imagine a giant inferno of nuclear matter wafting over where Denver had been less than an hour ago. Then I think I am a bad person. Then I imagine the atoms formerly known as Bill Gates wafting up as an expanding cloud in that inferno and smile a little. So the wireless may have to wait. I will try to tackle the modem.

holy crap, i'm ready to kill somebody. what am i doing? I didn't sign up for this. I have somehow caught a cold, and i think its from my computer, which I increasingly see as evil.

01/06/2004: I got the OReilly book running linux by Welsh, et al, from the library. I am hoping this will clue me in a little bit. I also got some dvds from the library, "elephant man," "fast cheap and out of control," and a eurythmics concert. I will now test these with kaffeine and ogle. kaffeine is hosed, of course, because of the limited codecs. ogle works on all three, but the video is jerky. time for more RAM? ugh.

Now I am playing with the modem. I downloaded the file slmdm-2.7.14.tar.gz and installed the modem. This seemed to work. However, kppp gave me a lot of hell, not letting me dial in. After playing with this for a while, I went to wvdial. wvdial cannot deal with the school's telephone system, which does not give you an immediate dialtone, thus i get NO DIALTONE errors. I had these in kppp as well, then set some waiting period, and it worked fine, only dying when it tried authentication. it's all totally hosed. meanwhile i am getting sicker, and had office hours, and goddamnit!

01/08/2004: My fever is passed, and I took a day away from the beast. Had better luck today. There is a wire that comes out of the wall, and by putzing around with the YaST system settings, and getting IP number advice from our sysadmin i got wired ethernet with dynamic IP going. This means i do not have to burn CDs on a freaking windows machine every time I want to put something on the machine. Feeling a little better.

The built in wireless is still holding out. It appears that there is some hardware/software OKness, but that I merely have configured things incorrecto. And I do not know exactly what that would be. Our sysadmin put the HW addresses in the DHCP allow file, or whatever, but it does not seem to come through for the wireless. Lesson learned today: don't cry, ask your sysadmin.

01/10/2004: My neighbor showed me how to use the 'route' command. Now my laptop has wireless at home. So the drivers were ok, it was just a matter of some parameters. Because of this I am not taking the laptop to school much, so I am not working on this diary so very much. But I am still putzing with the computer.

01/19/2004: I just got back from a vacation away from my computer. Actually I went to see my girlfriend and my compadres for my 30th birthday. Ugg. I just recently got rsync working here and am getting my work/home setup rsync'd. or r'sync'd, you might say. In the next month I want to figure out the freaking dvd player. According to top, the problem does not appear to be memory, rather something from the dvd pipe. I need to learn /usr/sbin/raw and make the device raw. totally.

01/29/2004: am working with fetchmail to get email at home. this is not an ideal situation because i tend to keep email laying around nonnew. hmmm.

01/31/2004: ahha! poked around on the web a little, and it seems i needed to set my drive to have some IDE thing. the upshot is that i go to YaST, hardware, IDE DMA, and turn IDE DMA on for the CD drive. and amazing! it works. it works. and i don't have to piss around with hdparm. eeexcellent.