I thought I'd post my recent experiences trying to get Linux running on my
Compaq 1700XL notebook computer.
A few details about the system:
o 600 mhz Pentium III with Speedstep technology
o 192 megs of ram
o 6 gig hard drive
o DVD player (Future bay - swappable with floppy)
o Touchpad mouse (PS/2)
o ATI Rage Mobility graphics
o ESS Allegro sound
o Win modem
o 14.1 TFT 1024x768 LCD panel
o ACPI power management circuitry *
* This last item caused lot's of headaches.
My first attempt - install Mandrake 7.2:
Mandrake 7.2 uses the 2.2.x version of the Linux kernel. I was able to install
it to the portion of the disk (about 2 gigs) that I obtained by erasing my
Windows D partition. Mandrake managed to get the network PCMCIA card working but
didn't manage to get my ATI Rage Mobilility working properly. Indeed my first
attempt to start X resulted in a bright white screen which paniced me (I was
thinking I was burning it up) into pulling the battery to shut the system off. I
then visited the Linux laptop web page and found a working XF86Config file which
allowed my system to display X windows at 1024 x 768 resolution. The linux
laptop web page is at:
http://www.linux-laptop.net/
Unfortunately Mandrake 7.2 didn't have ACPI support. This is only supported in
the 2.4 series kernels. My sound electronics weren't recognized and of course I
could only play DVDs from Windows. I concluded that too much of the system would
be unuseable with this version of Linux and scrubbed it off the system.
Second attempt - install Mandrake 8.0:
This looked a lot more promising! The install went smoothly. My graphics
hardware worked right out the box. Sound worked immediately too. However, when
I shut the the system down, it didn't power down. I pressed the power button.
Too late I saw the Phoenix "suspend to disk" splash screen appear. When I
powered my system back up, I saw the Phoenix splash screen start incrementing a
bar graph which stated that it was retoring memory from disk. The system then
hung at about the 80% restored point. The only way I could break out of the loop
was to pull the battery. When I tried to start Windows, I discovered that
Windows had been fatally corrupted. I wasn't too concerned since I had a full
backup to tape sitting on the shelf. I then decided to completely obliterate
Windows. I erased the partition table and used my Mandrake 8.0 distro to use the
entire disk for Linux.
Things were looking good although I was still not able to
power down the system effectively. I located the ACPI package and installed it.
On the next reboot I saw messages about the acpid daemon starting but there
being no kernel support. Now the challenge was to build ACPI support into the
kernel. I didn't see any obvious way to figure out how the Mandrake kernel that
had been installed by the distro was configured. With Redhat, a config directory
is placed in the kernel sources directory tree which apparently has the kernel
configurations for several popular kernels such as SMP, 486, 586 etc.. I didn't
see that with Mandrake. So I did a 'make xconfig' and started poking in settings
that seemed reasonable. The kernel built ok but I started getting module symbol
errors as well as missing PCMCIA support. Sure enough, it turned out that I had
not selected PCMCIA support. I rebooted again and was getting further. My acpid
was working (the machine would shut itself off on shutdown) and my PCMCIA
controller was working. My PCMCIA modules weren't working so I now set out to
fix the modules.
The one piece of advice in the Mandrake reference guide is that
even if you are using the same version of the kernel as the modules that were
installed with the system, you should delete the /lib/modules/mod-version
subdirectory. I did that and was getting errors when I tried to do a 'make
modules'. The build would log about 30 or 40 lines of activitity and then die
with a 'don't know how to make' message. I did a search on www.deja.com and saw
a suggestion to do a 'make mrproper'. Unfortunately I should have saved my
kernel configuration to a file because that resulted in my previous kernel
configuration being lost. After dutifully re-doing my kernel configuration I was
finally able to build a new kernel and new modules. The system booted cleanly.
Unfortunately, I now noticed that my mouse pointer would freeze after a few
minutes.
My conjecture is that either the touchpad mouse is setup to use the
wrong IRQ or there is a kernel bug of some kind. Again www.deja.com seemed to
indicate that a number of people were having this kind of problem but I wasn't
able to pin it down.
One other problem - the acpi support uses a polling scheme to check the power
management circuitry. A message flashed on the screen during startup stating
that there was a command that would reduce the cpu cycles used by the power
management software. Also, there were some complaints that the CPU usage was
"excessive" whatever that means.
Bottom line was that I restored my Windows software and decided to punt on
running Linux on the system. I also think that before I spend a lot of time
trying to get a satisfactory Linux setup again, I'll buy a new hard disk and
remove the one that has the Windows software running. I'm forced to conclude at
this point that this specific laptop is "Windows Centric".
Comments anyone?
-Alex
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