Robert B. White 7 June 1998 Setting up a ChemBook Laptop for Linux & W95 Actually MSDOS will be on it, too, when this is all over, as well as S.u.S.E. Linux 5.2 (kernel 2.0.33), April 1998, and W95 with USB support, P/N X03-52599. As received the machine had W95 in primary partition 1 and a system save area in primary partition 4. Partitions 2 and 3 were unused. DOS and W95 can see only the first primary partition and the first extended one. All else is invisible. Apparantly only the primary partition can be made bootable (active). Linux, of course, can see everything, but the SuSE version of fdisk could set partition types only to 82 (swap) and 83 (ext2). The first problem, then, is disk layout. If the manufacturer's partition 4 can be left alone it will survive. If not, it can be rebuilt with a program supplied with the computer, it will be created in the next available partition. To keep it in partition 4, partitions 1-3 must exist and fill the "front" of the disk when this save partition is built. This may mean creating dummy partitions, running the save setup, then removing the dummy partitions. This can be done with SuSE fdisk. The target layout I used is as follows, adjust yours to suit: +------------------------------------------------+ hda1 | cyls 1-131 528,160 KB Primary | W95 Bootable | (DOS C: 516 MB) 512 MB requested in | Type 6 | DOS fdisk | +------------------------------------------------+ hda2 | cyls 132-777 2,604,672 KB Extended | Type 5 | (DOS ext, 2544 MB) | | +---------------------------------------+ | hda5 | cyls 132-182 205,600 KB Logical | DOS 6.2 | | (DOS D: 201 MB) 200MB requested in | Type 6 | | DOS fdisk | | +---------------------------------------+ | hda6 | cyls 183-228 185,440 KB | Linux / | | | bootable | | | Type 83 | +---------------------------------------+ | hda7 | cyls 229-245 68,512 KB | Linux swap | | | Type 82 | +---------------------------------------+ | hda8 | cyls 246-609 1,467,616 KB | Linux /usr | | | Type 83 | +---------------------------------------+ | hda9 | cyls 610-777 677,344 KB | Linux /home | | | Type 83 +--------+---------------------------------------+ hda3 | (none defined) | +------------------------------------------------+ hda4 | cyls 778-787 40,320 KB Extended | system | (non-DOS 39 MB) | Type a0 +------------------------------------------------+ Start with DOS fdisk and build the primary and extended partitions, and create a logical partition for dos. Format the 95 and DOS partitions using /s for both. Apply labels now! I lost my complete installation apparantly by using label after installation, it apparantly damaged a sector in hda6, rendering many hours of installation and setup wasted. Install W95, which should be entirely normal. Install the manufacturer supplied drivers for the display, PCMCIA cards, and whatever else you have. Install Linux using hda6 through hda9 as indicated in the chart. This too should be entirely normal and is really convenient with SuSE's bootable CD-ROM. Now the fun begins! First get the mouse and display working so you can use windowing environments. MOUSE In /etc/rc.config add -R to the gpm parameters. This is part of the process to enable the mouse to work with both text screens and GUIs. In /etc/XF86Config, after it is set up by whatever means you like, in Section "Pointer" define Device "/dev/gpmdata". This pipe will be created by gpm. With all this done, both an external PS2 mouse and the internal mouse pad will work simultaneously! DISPLAY The laptop lacks an isolated `+' key, so the Ctrl-Alt-+ combination cannot be given to switch display modes. The display may not be too happy at resolutions other than its native one, 1024 x 768, so I recommend setting up XF86Config to produce this one resolution only. I found the following, as well as a few other, settings to work, so here is something to start with: Section "Monitor" Identifier "Primary Monitor" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Unknown" HorizSync 31.5-48.5 VertRefresh 30-90 Modeline "1024x768" 44.90 1024 1025 1026 1027 768 776 784 817 EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Primary Card" VendorName "Unknown" BoardName "Chips & Technologies CT65555" VideoRam 4096 EndSection I'm not really sure what's needed in Section "Screen", but mode "1024x768" should come first and no others are needed. Next customize your root account: I like tcsh (no religious war intended). I also find "LESSOPEN" prevents "less filename" from working, though pipes to less work, so I add "unsetenv LESSOPEN" to .cshrc. I import root's setup files from my "deskside" system to get the remaining setups I like, which is a story for another time. Now is a good time to import and install the current version of your favorite editor if it's more recent than was on your Linux distribution. Now it's time to recompile the kernel to add any missing devices you want to use and prepare for ones you might want to add later, such as PCMCIA cards. To get sound on the ChemBook, enable "SoundBlaster" and "Generic OPL2/OPL3 FM synthesizer support". I also enabled SCSI support in anticipation of using a PCMCIA card, but enabled none of the listed card types. At this point the PCMCIA card manager is working and recognizes the modem and ethernet cards, but not the SCSI CARD. Time to add pcmcia-cs-3.0.1.tar.gz from ftp://hyper.stanford.edu/pub/pcmcia, and sym53c500_cs.tar.gz from Thomas Corner (tcorner@via.at). -rw-r--r-- root/root 1858 Dec 19 06:34 1997 .vimrc -rw-r--r-- root/root 1170 Dec 6 05:25 1997 .gvimrc -rwxr-xr-x root/root 4158 Feb 8 20:37 1997 .cshrc -rwxr-xr-x root/root 4902 Jan 20 12:54 1997 .aliases -rwxr-x--x root/root 3581 Oct 15 18:29 1996 .xterm-labels -rw-r--r-- root/root 852 Aug 6 15:16 1994 .login -rw-r--r-- root/root 34 Jun 6 13:18 1993 .less -rw-r--r-- root/root 114 May 7 19:36 1993 .lessrc -rw-r--r-- root/root 114 May 7 19:36 1993 .lesskey