New Laptop!

The Good Getting the T42p up and running was remarkably straightforward considering how little I know about modern x86 architecture machines. I started by booting it up and letting the Windows XP install process grind along. I poked about a bit to see if everything seemed to be working. It did. Next, I created a System Rescue CD and booted it up. Using qtparted, I blew away the IBM system rescue partition and resized the NTFS partition down to 10GB. It turns out I could have created my own rescue CDs, but since I’d already asked IBM to send me a set, I didn’t bother. Having created a bit of free space on the disk, I booted with the Debian “Sarge” network install disk, made a few partitions, and got a base system installed. Real sysadmins may question my partitioning choices: hda1 Boot Primary NTFS [] 10737.38 hda2 Primary Linux ext3 [Root] 16001.56 hda5 Logical Linux ext3 [Home] 4002.33 hda6 Logical Linux ext3 [Mail] 4002.33 hda7 Logical Linux ext3 [Share] 23201.10 hda8 Logical Linux swap 2066.97 Modern machines seem to just have a single huge partition, but I’ve never done it that way and so I’ve stuck with what makes me comfortable. In particular, I use the nntp backend of gnus to read mail; that leaves every message in a separate file, so the Mail partition is setup with a smaller than usual block size. The large swap partition is to ensure that I can hibernate the machine. Anyway, Debian is great. Update /etc/apt/sources.list, run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and you’ve got an up-to-date system running. To build a modern kernel, I installed gcc, binutils, etc. I built a stock 2.6.8.1 kernel with William Stein ’s .config file. At this point, I had a running system. The next problem was getting X Windows up and running. I decided to build X.org’s X11R6/6.8.0. I used apt-get to grab a working X11 install, but I never tried to run the XFree86 server. There aren’t (yet) any packaged versions of the X.org server, so I grabbed the sources and built them. This is a delightfully fast laptop. The X.org build system will apparently only install in /usr/X11R6, so I renamed a few things and made a couple of links before running make install. To get emacs running again (!), I had to copy the libXaw3d libraries over from the XFree86 install. Having grabbed William’s .config file, I went ahead and grabbed his /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file too. Ran like a charm. The WiFi card in this laptop uses the Atheros chipset, so the madwifi drivers work perfectly. Patching and rebuilding the kernel with Software Suspend 2 support quickly got me a “hibernate” function working. Suspending to RAM was already working with ACPI. Installing drivers for the Conexant HSF modem even got that working. I’m using the free drivers, but really, I don’t use dialup anymore so I’ll probably never bother to buy a commercial license. In short: from unpacking the boxes to a working Linux box in a few short hours, not counting the time it took to migrate all my data across. Not too shabby.

The Bad Murphy is ever vigilant. Nothing I was worried about turned out to be difficult to setup at all. Something I didn’t give any thought to at all, the ability to display on the LCD panel and an external monitor at the same time, turns out to be…hard. Hard in this context being roughly synonymous with “impossible”. As someone who gives presentations with fair regularity, this is seriously bad. I’m also hoping it’s something that can be fixed fairly quickly. It seems to be related to IBM ACPI support. Fingers crossed. [Update 21 Sep 2004: turns out there’s a BIOS setting to toggle between DRI (some sort of digital output for external LCD displays) and VGA (for traditional CRTs). It’s set to DRI by default and setting it to VGA fixes the problem. Whew!]