LapTops
From MyLinuxNotes
Check out my DebiaN wiki for more info about laptops.
Contents |
One No-No about laptops
If you are dual booting don't install Linux soley on one of you spare drives. If you remove the drive (to put the battery in, etc..) LILO will gripe and you'll have to fdisk /mbr to boot to your other OS, or put the drive back in.
To get around that issue I believe that you can put a boot partition on hda and then LILO won't gripe.
Repartitioning
If you have an OS on your system and you want to put Linux on it you'll have to make room by creating at least one additional partition. Partition Magic works sometimes and at least the version I had gripped about NTFS.
A friend of mine told me about a trick with Norton's Ghost that worked great. You make a Ghost of the drive that you want to repartition onto a spare drive. You then extract the ghosted image back onto the original drive but tell ghost you want the extraction to be say 5GB less. Now you have 5GB of free space that you can partition for linux. Granted this only works if you have the free space to begin with.
Dell Latitude C840
RedHat 7.3 installed pretty much right out of the box. The only thing that wasn't good to go was X. That was easily fixed by going to nVIDIA's site and getting the correct display driver and making a few changes to the </code>XF86Config-4</code> file, which I found here. This is what I did, which is taken from that page:
Boot and begin install of Red Hat as usual When you come to the section to configure X, choose to skip it. Complete your custom installation. When booted and logged on as root, run Xconfigurator. Where appropriate, choose: "Generic Monitor that can do 1600x1200 @ 76Hz" (Note: while there are Dell laptop monitor types, none of them are correct in RH 7.1, as this screen can do 1600x1200 from 60Hz to 85Hz) "nVidia GeForce 2 MX" "16 bit 1600x1200" "Do Not Probe" Do NOT test the settings. These setting do not work. If you are tempted to try it, the screen will look like it was put through a paper shredder, but will not come back. You will have to take the system down to regain control of the system. You need to download and install two RPMs from the nVidia web site. They are currently located at http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=linux I chose the following files under the heading: RedHat 7.3, one CPU, uniprocessor kernel However, there are RPMs for the Enterprise kernel, SMP Kernel and SMP systems (an SMP laptop !!!), if you require these for some reason. There are also RPMs for earlier version of RedHat and several versions of Mandrake Linux as well. Once the RPMs are installed, you need to hand edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file. Exact instructions are on the nVidia web site http://www.nvidia.com/docs/lo/1021/SUPP/README.txt ... but here are abbreviated instructions for the anxious.... 1) Delete or comment out the lines in Section "Module" that say Load "GLcore" Load "dri" 2) Change the driver used, by changing Section "Device"... from... Driver "nv" To... Driver "nvidia" Then startx
Now everything should be good to go. If you should ever try to upgrade/recompile your kernel you'll need to download nvidia's source and compile a custom driver. Check out nvidia's pdf install guide for more info. I recently had to do this and here is how:
# rpmbuild --rebuild NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4191.src.rpm
Presentations
Trying to put on a couple of presentations using OpenOffice Impress I ran into a couple of problems. Since the resolution is 1600x1200 it didn't work too well with the projector. First I added the following line to my XF86Config-4:
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "on"
Because the documentation for my NVIDIA card stated that this should detect the freqs of the second monitor. When I used the Fn+F8 to try to switch to the projector it changed the resolution, but the desktop was way bigger than the screen on both the laptop and the projector. If I hooked it up to another monitor it looked fine on the monitor but was too big on the laptop. I copied XF86Config-4 to XF86Config-4_800. Then I changed the display subsection of the screen section of XF86Config-4_800 to:
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "800x600"
Virtual 800 600
EndSubSection
Then to start the server from within the current X session hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login as a user and start X with the following:
startx -- :1 -xf86config XF86Config-4_800
Now you should have a 800x600 display. To switch between the two just hit Ctrl+Alt+F7 and Ctrl+Alt+F8. To close out the 800x600 just hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
I tried using this for a presentation and it didn't work. Booting the computer with the projector cable attached did though. Then on another it worked like a champ so it really depends on the projector.
Really you could also add "800x600" to your current Modes line and use Ctrl+Alt + or - to change the resolution. This can cause some problems with X so you should play around with both to see which one works for you.
Wireless
Using the "Dell" wireless NIC that came with my laptop I was able to get connected to the WAP at Linux World Expo with a few simple commands with eth0 set to DHCP:
iwconfig eth0 essid <essid> key <key>- and
ifconfig eth0 up
Dell Inspiron 7500
RedHat 7.2 installed right out of the box and X was perfect. Funny thing though I upgraded to 7.3 and it hosed the Xserver. All I could get was 1024x768, not that I really tried to fix it. I believe that it had a nvidia card so try refering to the above notes on the C840.
Debian Sarge was a royal pain. The install would fail at "Load components from cd" every time. Google to the resuce again! I found the soulution here and here is the portion that helped:
[Start your install in] "expert" [mode]
before the "detect & mount cdrom" step I started a shell
(<ctrl><alt><F2>)
and gave these commands
modprobe ide-core options="ide=nodma"
modprobe piix
modprobe ide-detect
Back in the main installer screen. I selected the
detect & mount cddrom
option. This took me to a long list of modules that autodetection
suggested were necessary.
I turned off all but these: ide-disk, ide-cd, isofs
when prompted to enter parameters for these modules,
I said "Y" but did not enter any parameters.
The modules loaded with no errors.
Next I was prompted to "Start PC card services?"
I said "N"
The installer warned that some modules were not available or installed
(can't recall which). The list was
agpgart, ide-mod, ide-probe-mod, ide-generic, ide-floppy
Next I get a report that it has detected a good cdrom:
Debian GNU/Linux testing "Sarge" - Official NetInst Snapshot i386 Binary-1 (20040806)
When prompted to "Load installer components from cd?"
I said "Y"
Now it shows the list of installer components to load. This is the
step that failed before.
As a further check,
ls -l /cdrom/dists shows several symlinks, all pointing to the "sarge"
directory.
