by Bettina J. Henry,
bjhenry1@home.com
Ver. 3.1
Last update 12/9/00 disclaimer
by Bettina J. Henry,
bjhenry1@home.com
Ver. 3.1
Last update 12/9/00 disclaimer
Original
Install Page
Multimedia
Table of Contents
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Introduction
After staring forlornly
at my then 7 year old 486/33 desktop tower clone with 4 meg RAM and 80
meg hard drive, I had decided that enough was enough! The battery was dead,
necessitating a manual BIOS reconfiguration at every boot (too lazy to
buy a new one), so on June 29, 1999 I purchased a Compaq Presario 1267
notebook from Radio Shack (a now discontinued model - at least at RS).
On July 2, 1999, it was ready to pick up and thus my journey away from
the dark side began. Note that some distribution of Linux (Caldera OpenLinux
1.3) DID ressurect my old machine, but that's beyond the scope of this
laptop page...! You can find the details about my 486, "Tank",
here.
Here are the specs for my laptop named "Naboo" (not much different from the 1245 and other "later" 1200 series that are frequently being advertised):
Compaq Presario 1267
AMD K6/2 333Mhz
"with 3D Now!"
64 MB RAM
4 GB hard drive
JBL Pro sound/speakers
(built-in)
ESS 1868/1869 Sound
chips
Neomagic (128 XD)
128 bit video w/2MB RAM, Active matrix color 800x600, 12.1" LCD display
Compaq 56K modem
(model is Compaq 56DF, a Lucent-based winmodem)
Touch pad (Synaptics)
1 open PCMCIA slot
for type I, II, or III cards
24X CD-ROM (built-in
and bootable)
1.44 floppy (built-in)
USB port
9-pin serial, 25-pin
parallel, 15-pin VGA, PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
A security doohicky?
(teeny tiny slot) for locking the thing up
Wt. is about 7 lbs
with battery (not too shabby, considering everything is built-in)
ADDED SEPARATELY:
Linksys "Combo" (UTP/BNC) Network card, Iomega Zip250 (parallel port/SCSI-emulating),
HP Laserjet 4P, HP Officejet 520, Motorola "CyberSurfr" cable modem (attaches
to NIC via UTP). Note that the internal modem is a "winmodem"
BUT... GREAT NEWS!!! The model of winmodem
in this Presario 1267 is now supported in Linux, although
I haven't tried fooling around with it. So you Compaq 56DF
winmodem-havers out there like me, can get all the details from the Linmodems.org
site, with specific drivers available either here
or
here.
Huh?
Well...
in my previous writeup for this notebook which can be found here,
I had descriptions of my tri-boot of SuSE 6.1 with Windows NT and Windows
98. Check it out if you're curious. However, for
those of you who have frequented this site, this is my "huh?" section,
letting you know that something major has happened on Naboo, my notebook.
Yep. I took the dive and decided to upgrade to the latest SuSE.
Why, might you ask? Well for one thing, my poor little notebook
had so much become my day to day (or actually, my "night to night") workhorse
machine, the one that I learned Linux on, the one with so much stuff loaded
on it and updated on it and what not, that I *finally* worked SuSE 6.1
to death, along with practically filling up the hard drive partition and
corrupting some blocks and sectors. After multiple fsck repairs
and eventually being required to boot from floppy (which allowed me to
get to my partitions just fine, but Netscape refused to start), I just
said, "Aww... the heck with it", and wiped the Linux partition
out to do a new install of the latest stuff. Hard drive sector
problems aside, I knew that I also wanted to get a later kernel (SuSE 6.1
shipped with 2.2.7 and 6.3 ships with 2.2.13) and the latest glibc 2.1
(SuSE 6.1 had glibc 2.0). All in all, I felt that getting the
latest libraries and such would be A Very Good Thing(tm), so I decided
to go for it.
I will finish writing
up and posting updates for when this notebook had SuSE 6.1 loaded and these
can be accessed from the original
installation page. However now that I have a new version
of the OS, it'll certainly open up some really great application install
possibilities!
Installing Linux
SuSE 6.3 with Kernel 2.2.13
Well, here we go... again. I decided to try doing a FTP install of SuSE 6.3 this time around and once again, it installed pretty good the very first time (and so far the only time, as of 3/15/99). To do this, I whipped out my old SuSE 6.1 install boot disk and selected to do an install via FTP. When you do this, the installer will help you configure your network (in my case, I chose to startup PCMCIA services - which inturn found my Linksys PCMCIA NIC), then I assigned myself my original internal IP, configured the subnet mask and name server, told it to go through my gateway/firewall Stealth, and off it went When it started, I selected "expert mode" so that I could manually create the partitions (the default install creates a single partition whereas I created a "/", "/usr", and swap). After about an hour of downloading and installing packages, I loaded Lilo in the mbr once again, and otherwise left the 98/NT partition alone.
SuSE 6.3's FTP install loaded a whole suite of default packages (about 260) via a later version of YaST (1.03). Note that there is now a "YaST2", although I haven't tried it yet. None of the "commercial" packages such as Wordperfect 8 or Applix installed via FTP. Those can be obtained from the official boxed version. Thus... I found that not having all those commercial packages left me quite a bit of space freed up when everything was completed.
As before, SuSE defaults to KDE (6.3 installs version 1.1.2) but when I tried it, I discovered that an error had apparently occurred during the FTP install whereby X didn't install completely. So... using Midnight Commander (a nice file manager app), I FTP'd over to the XFree86 Project web site and downloaded X version 4.0, the very latest (I believe that SuSE 6.3 would normally install 3.3.5). This 4.0 version just released literally a couple of weeks ago! Talk about bleeding edge! ;-). I installed it using the installer script called Xinstall.sh and then the fun began.
Well... as those who do X configurations know, there are a number of little utilities available to help you get going. Of course, if you're very congnizant of your hardware, you could manually edit your own XF86Config file yourself. The rest of us like having something to do that for you. So, per the recommendation, I tried X 4.0's newest configurator, which is called by running:
XFree86 -configure
Kinda cool, but it complained about support for my Neomagic 128XD chip (which I knew was available with the 3.3.5+) releases. So tried the old configurators xf86setup and XF86Config. Still no luck. So then I decided to try SuSE's own SaX program. I had heard alot of good things about it and never really tried it when I had SuSE 6.1, so I gave it a shot. WOW! It worked! Started up X and got my KDE. I've included the SaX-generated XF86Config file below. Also, you might recall the impetus behind writing any of my experiences up at all - and that was sound. I had promised myself way back when that if I got the sound going, I'd writeup a laptop page. Well this time around, a little bit wiser, I merely went to another console, copied my previously archived conf.modules to the file modules.conf (which this SuSE uses) in /etc and did a modprobe sb. BAM! The sound for this ESS 1868/69 loaded immediately. No muss, no fuss. I stuck the command in my SuSE's boot.local for startup whenever I reboot.
One thing I've noticed
after working with this the past couple of days, is that the colors seem
much crisper, both at a console and when running X! Perhaps
due to making use of this notebook's 128bit video chip or maybe it's just
psychological???!!! Regardless, I'll be exploring what X 4.0
can do for me! I'll also be writing up updates for whatever
apps I install on this SuSE 6.3 as well, like my install of and experiences
with the latest release of Netscape's Open Source Mozilla M14 release browser,
so stay tuned!
Conclusion...
so far (as of 3/15/00)
After about 8 and
a half months of ownership, a little over 7 months of which (except for
the last couple of days) were spent running SuSE 6.1, I can truly say that
this Presario is a STILL a pretty nice box. It rarely goes
travelling and stays up 24/7. It's got the speed, the space,
the RAM (which is easily upgradeable - and I NOW think it's about time
to upgrade the memory 'cause my baby is swapping to disk with each Netscape
I startup!), a decent built-in sound system... all the niceties for the
internet-multimedia crowd, and I will truthfully count myself in that classification!
I was originally looking for a model with DVD, but since I had limited
myself to Radio Shack (have that 'ole RS credit card), I think I got a
pretty decent compromise machine (heck, it's faster than my 486/33 and
in a MUCH smaller package). Of course, AMD and Intel continue to duke it
out with their 1+GHz chips, so I'm DEFINTIELY obsoleted....:-). The USB
port is promising (support is now supposedly available in the 2.3.x and
2.4.x kernels).
It's been interesting
working with 4 different "flavors" of Linux over the past 8 months and
a version running on a laptop at that! Although I didn't get
much chance to fool around with any other distros other than Red Hat on
this notebook early on, I've done enough to see the differences between
SuSE, Caldera OpenLinux, Red Hat, and Mandrake. I am STILL
proudly displaying my "POWERED BY SuSE LiNUX" sticker above the "Designed
for Microsoft Windows 98" sticker on my little laptop and right after I
installed SuSE 6.3, SuSE announced the availability of SuSE 6.4 for release
3/27/00 (it's like a deja vu thing with me... when I bought 6.1, 6.2 was
announced). Oh well.
And now for the techy stuff...
(Note:
This runs X at 800x600 using the SVGA server and 16 bpp by default)
-------------------------------------------------------
# SaX autogenerated XF86Config file # This file was generated from the SaX # Version: 2.8 - sax@suse.de # Date: Wed Mar 15 22:22:50 EST 2000 # Xserver:SVGA # MouseVendor:Unknown # MouseName:Unknown # RamDac:81 # Dac8:81 # Dac16:81 # Dac24: # Dac32: Section "Files" RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi" EndSection Section "ServerFlags" AllowMouseOpenFail EndSection Section "Module" EndSection # This section is no longer supported # See a template below # Section "XInput" # EndSection Section "Keyboard" Protocol "Standard" XkbRules "xfree86" XkbModel "pc104" XkbLayout "us" EndSection Section "Pointer" Protocol "PS/2" Device "/dev/psaux" SampleRate 60 BaudRate 1200 EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Primary-Monitor" VendorName "COMPAQ" ModelName "SVGA COLOR" HorizSync 31.5-38 VertRefresh 43-60 Modeline "1600x1000" 79.04 1600 1616 1968 2080 1000 1000 1005 1044 Modeline "1280x960" 63.23 1280 1296 1552 1664 960 960 965 1003 Modeline "1024x768" 50.46 1024 1040 1216 1328 768 768 773 802 Modeline "640x480" 24.96 640 656 720 832 480 480 484 501 Modeline "1600x1200" 79.04 1600 1616 1968 2080 1200 1200 1205 1253 Modeline "1280x1024" 63.23 1280 1296 1552 1664 1024 1024 1029 1070 Modeline "1152x864" 56.85 1152 1168 1384 1496 864 864 869 902 Modeline "800x600" 39.00 800 816 928 1040 600 600 605 626 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Primary-Card" VendorName "---AUTO DETECTED---" BoardName "---AUTO DETECTED---" EndSection Section "Screen" Driver "SVGA" Device "Primary-Card" Monitor "Primary-Monitor" DefaultColorDepth 16 SubSection "Display" Depth 32 Modes "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 16 Modes "800x600" Virtual 800 600 EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 8 Modes "640x480" EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Driver "Accel" Device "Primary-Card" Monitor "Primary-Monitor" DefaultColorDepth 16 SubSection "Display" Depth 32 Modes "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "640x480" EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 16 Modes "800x600" Virtual 800 600 EndSubSection SubSection "Display" Depth 8 Modes "640x480" EndSubSection EndSection
Copyright/trademark notice: "Linux" is a creation of and is trademarked by Linus Torvalds. "Compaq", "Presario", "Radio Shack", "SuSE", "RedHat", "AMD" (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.), "3D NOW!","JBL, "Neomagic", "Synaptics", "Microsoft Windows" (and it's named versions)","HP" (Hewlett-Packard), "Intel",... and any other name brand product/company mentioned at this site are copyrights and/or trademarks of the respective company.
Copyright © 2000 by Bettina J. Henry