I've documented my experiences in setting up my laptop in the hopes that it might help others making similar attempts. I should point out that while I refer to this as my laptop it is actually owned by my employer, but assigned to me as the sole user.
Index
My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T23. Of course with Thinkpads, the model is hardly a complete configuration. So, more specifically, I have an IBM Thinkpad Model T23 Type 2647-8MU. It has the smaller LCD TFT screen, with a maximum resolution of 1024 by 768 and it has the DVD without the CDRW. The CPU is a 1.133 GHz Intel Pentium III and it came with 256Mb of memory and a 28 Gb disk drive (manufacturers call this 30Gb, weasling around the difference between a 2^30 byte gigabyte and a 10^9 byte manufacturers-excuse-for-a-gigabyte).
Based on the stickers that are on it, I believe that IBM shipped the machine with Microsoft Windows® XP Professional installed. However, by the time that I saw it, it was running my firm's standard laptop configuration with Microsoft Windows® 2000 on a single partition spanning the entire disk with various third-party and locally developed applications installed. Roughly 90% of the disk was unused.
As much as I love to hate everything that comes out of Redmond, as a practical matter, I need to keep the stuff that was installed on my laptop. However, I do not need to keep all that free disk space tied to Windows® 2000. I've been doing multi-boot systems with various flavors of Microsoft Windows® and Linux since around 1994, so I figured I'd do the same thing with this machine.
What I haven't done before is partition a system with the Windows® NT File System (NTFS). Furthermore, I read some things that suggested that trying to use LILO with Windows® 2000 wouldn't work. So I bought a copy of Partition Magic 7.1 and set about partitioning my disk and installing Boot Magic and SuSE 7.2 Professional, which I had from setting up my last laptop with my last employer. Boot Magic requires a primary, non-hidden, FAT or VFAT partition, and I was concerned about having all of the bootable partitions within the first 1024 cylindars as well as keeping my other partitions relatively small to limit the problems that I might have with fsck. I've wanted to try out the Reiser file system, but I figured that I would play it conservatively on my work machine. So I ended up with:
/boot directory,
/ directory, and
/home directory.
I should point out that I'm well familiar with the general rule of having swap be twice the size of physical memory, however, I've also read about the differences between Linux virtual memory management and other systems that strongly suggest that under Linux your swap should, at most, match your physical memory.
Anyway, the disk layout and installation kind of worked. The problem was that I had a new machine with an oldish distribution and the display and network drivers weren't sufficient. SuSE was kind of a fluke for me. I've always used Slackware before, but had gone with SuSE in order to have the same distribution as my coworkers at my last job. However, given the driver situation and the fact that Slackware 8.1 was just out, and probably had pretty current drivers, I started over.
One of the first problems that I encounted was with Boot Magic. As it turns out, there are some special steps that you must take when dealing with NTFS that are documented on their web site, but not in the manual that comes with the product. Because I was following the instructions in the book, when I first tried to install another flavor of Linux, and then tried to reconfigure Boot Magic, I got very stuck. Technical support was very helpful. The most helpful piece of advice that they gave me was that I should find a Microsoft Windows® 98 or Millenium Edition boot disk, and run fdisk /mbr to restore the master boot record. Of course, once I knew that this could get me out of a serious jam, I decided to take a chance using LILO instead of Boot Magic. LILO worked just fine and Boot Magic no longer lives on my machine.
A side note about LILO is that if you set vga = 792
you can get a VESA framebuffer console with 1024x768 pixels
that's 24 bits deep. This is not mentioned in the commentary
found in /etc/lilo.conf, but is mentioned in the
commentary in /etc/X11/XF86Config-fbdev.
With the experience of the first pass under my belt, a sense that I could at least recover the Windows® 2000 installation, and a generally more experimental mindset, I targeted this installation:
C: with Windows® 2000 and
/dosc with Linux,
D: with Windows® 2000 and /dosd
with Linux,
/
directory, and
I'm not much of a gamer, so I'm far more concerned with getting
a reasonable display than an optimal display. Because of this,
I opted for the easy way out on the display configuration.
During the Slackware installation, I opted for the
1024x768x16 frame buffer and then copied
/etc/X11/XF86Config-fbdev to
/etc/X11/XF86Config and had a perfectly usable X11
configuration.
Later, I came back and set things up to use the native ``savage''
driver, by editing /etc/X11/XF86Config, replacing
these lines:
Section "Device"
Identifier "VESA Framebuffer"
Driver "fbdev"
#VideoRam 4096
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection
with these:
Section "Device"
Identifier "device1"
Driver "savage"
VendorName "S3 Incorporated"
BoardName "S3 Savage4"
VideoRam 16384
Option "power_saver"
EndSection
and these lines:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen 1"
Device "VESA Framebuffer"
Monitor "My Monitor"
with these:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen 1"
Device "device1"
Monitor "My Monitor"
Slackware's netconfig identified the right network
driver and I configured for DHCP and was able to connect to the
network immediately.
I enabled the APM module by uncommenting the appropriate line in
/etc/rc.d/rc.modules
While the Slackware installation helps you to mount FAT32 partitions, it doesn't help with NTFS partions. However, you can just add this line:
/dev/hda1 /dosc ntfs ro,umask=666 0 0
to /etc/fstab to get things going. Note that the
umask=666 part is important if you want non-root
users to be able to access the drive.
I edited /etc/fstab replacing these lines:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
with these lines:
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy auto noauto,user 0 0
I also ran these commands:
$ /bin/mv /mnt/cdrom /cdrom
$ /bin/mv /mnt/floppy /floppy
$ /bin/rmdir /mnt/hd
to set up the mount points the way that I like them. The change
in mount points is just a matter of personal preference. However,
changing from owner to user is
important if you want to allow users other than
root to mount these drives.
I added this line:
/sbin/modprobe i810_audio
to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and then ran:
# chmod go+rw /dev/audio /dev/dsp
which made everything except XEmacs think that the sound was
working fine. Unfortunately, the thing didn't actually generate
any sound. I tried the obvious ways to get the volume turned up
(manual switches and KDE configuration tools) without luck.
To actually get sound, I downloaded the latest version of ALSA
(alsa-driver-0.9.0rc5) and associated lib, oss, tools, and utils
packages. Note that oss is at rc1 where the other packages were
at rc5. I configured ALSP for the sound card
intel8x0. When installing the drivers, ALSA
really wants there to be an init.d
directory somewhere before you run make install. I
made one as /etc/rc.d/init.d. Then I edited
/etc/rc.d/rc.local to run
/etc/rc.d/init.d/alsasound start. I also add a
number of calls to /usr/bin/amixer to unmute all
output controls and set their volumes to 100%. Still, after
logging in (KDM, Gnome, and Sawfish), I have to reset the Master
volume with:
# amixer sset Master unmute 100%
in order to actually hear any sound. At that point, however, the
sound quality is good.
I didn't mess with the modem when I did the initial installation.
However, I've since gone back and installed Lucid WinModem
support from the package ltmodem-8.22a4.tar.gz,
available under the GPL, and have used kppp
successfully. Installation is extremely
straight-forward. Simply unpack the package and run
./build_module followed by ./ltinst2
<rick@campbellcentral.org>