REQ: linux install guide

[beakmyn]

Now that Linux has been successfully installed anyone care to write the definitive guide on how to install Linux on a laptop? It would be helpful (to me at least) to address how to set up a dual boot system XP and Linux. Which comes first, boot partition size, boot loader setup and such. Once finished we could prolly make it sticky.

[Eron]

I was actually thinking of writing something up for this... skewed for Gentoo Linux, which is what I've got installed here.

It all pretty much boils down to the kernel configuration, drivers, and XFree86 setup, however.

I'll post a message when the first version's complete, so I can get corrections and updates. Yes, it'd be extraordinarily helpful to have documents such as these for those who'd like to run linux on their sager/prostar/...

[laclasse]

beakmyn,

I am getting my sager at the end of the week, and i believe by the start of next week it will be installed, configured ....I will then of course post a link to a guide, but it won't be with a general title "Linux on a laptop". Why ? Simply cause there is not one, but various way to install linux, as well as a lot of information on the web, covering every laptops.

I will be posting a link who shows the point specific to the Sager laptops, and where things are tricky under linux ( ex: Firewire, USB 2.0, tailored sound drivers and particulary the STD or Suspend to Disk or hibernation, which is particulary hard to get working on linux)

I believe the dual booting is covered on the web largely enough, if any of you have problems finding relevant links, don't hesitate to ask ;) Start on www.google.com/linux or even www.google.com/bsd.

[laclasse]

beakmyn, oops check this too http://sagerforums.com/forums/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=65&perpage=5&pagenumber=6

:p

[ROBOTHOUSE!]

I know I'd love to see one... cause the Sager 8886 is the crappiest machine ever to try to instal linux on at the moment. I just blew a bunch of crap away when I moved back from an experimental version of QT. Yeah, that shouldn't screw up X11, should it? ARRRGH! Plus I can't get my pcmcia worknig worth **** and that's just the beginning of the problems I've been having.

[laclasse]

ROBOTHOUSE!
Bahhh, don't despair. I have posted some info on how to install the gfx drivers. No current Linux distro will install them properly :banana:
Let me know if you need the link...Lets take your problem one at the time. Linux requires patience, but when you'll get a working system, you won't regret the perfs. ( Did i mention : Desktop: Debian Linux Sid instable (buhahaha) Linux 2.4.20 kernel with preempt patch and low latency, AMD 2000+, Asus Mobo KT400 chipset, 512 MB of 400 Mhz PC3200 DDR ram, dual WD 80 Gigs 8 megs cache RaidO FastTrack PCI card, Ati 9000 Pro Hercules 128 MB DDR : Quake3Arena 1024x768 FULL details, textures etc....240/250 FPS ). I have currently running : Half Life, CS, SoF I (Native Linux Loki version) SoF II (thanks wine), Alice in Wonderland, AoE, UT, UT2k3 ( 70/80 FPS 1024x768), Max Paine and tweaking Tony Hawk Pro Skater III now but it is a pain...)

By the way, what PCMCIA card do you want to use ? WiFi ? Network ? You should install the package called pcmcia-cs, and uses the serial interface of the package. But essentially i need to know what pcmcia card you are using.....Unfortunately linux isn't user friendly, but really performing and free....plenty of different user interfaces...etc.

[dirtboy]

Hey ROBOT, you and me have been working on the same problem for awhile. The pcmcia-cs package will not work correctly with our PCMCIA controller. The guys at the pcmcia-cs told me I should be using kernel drivers. I did and I almost got everything working. Compile with PCMCIA support and cardbus support. You have to use the yenta_socket module, ds, then run cardmgr -f. That should detect your card. Then, emerge wireless-tools and use iwconfig. I used this link:

http://www.linuxonthego.com/articles.php?article=3com

Just ignore the stuff at the beginning on installing the card drivers, cardmgr should load them for you on your Belkin.

laclasse,
I saw your post on the 9000 drivers. Are you sure the commercial 9000 chip is the same as the Mobility chip?

[laclasse]

Pretty sure yes. Read the toms Hardware review of the M9 chip, it is basically a 9000 chip with power savings....Getting the 5660 this friday, and should confirm any doubt. Thanks for the pcmcia-cs tip. By the way, SOUND ship ??? Who can post the result of lspci -vv as root here ? Thank you....:banana:

[laclasse]

dirtboy,

Couln't find my post again about the Graphic drivers install. Has it been moved ? If so where ??? A link will be mint ;)

[laclasse]

As promised, the linux install guide on the 5660 is in the works. As well i will need help for porting that to the 8886/8887. Very curious about TV Tuner and Smartcard reader/MP3 player. How will that get recognised under Linux ?

For all you desperate Linux users, i have found a link that will help you a great deal. Only thing not accurate so far in the X drivers as this laptop was a ATI 7500 Mob card instead of the 9000.
http://cpbotha.net/clevo5600/clevo5600_linux/

check it out !. As well, i have find my post again, and for anybody wishing Hardware 3D acceleration on linux. Here is the post. Enjoy.

http://sagerforums.com/forums/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=1256&perpage=5&pagenumber=3
:banana: :banana: :banana: :banana:
:banana:

OpenSource, Share Ideas, Knowledge and Code and work for a safer Internet ;)

[ROBOTHOUSE!]

Dirtoy, right now pcmcia has dropped to low priority on my list. I screwed up my x11 by going from an experimental version of QT to the stable version of QT. Why? Because I wanted to use QT Designer, which was seg-faulting under the exp. version. This apparently blew up something I did not know hot to fix. I tried to emerge update world, but things are still broke. Actually, I'm getting a failure when trying the emerge. I'm in a pissy mood about linux right now, and will have to use another computer till I have more time to dick around with the laptop. Woe is me. I'll probably wait till someone writes a man ual about how to do it specifically for my machine, as I don't have enough time (I've already spent a month straight trying to get it to work.) So, I guess WinXP will have to do until I happen upon some free time on the weekends.

Originally posted by dirtboy
Hey ROBOT, you and me have been working on the same problem for awhile. The pcmcia-cs package will not work correctly with our PCMCIA controller. The guys at the pcmcia-cs told me I should be using kernel drivers. I did and I almost got everything working. Compile with PCMCIA support and cardbus support. You have to use the yenta_socket module, ds, then run cardmgr -f. That should detect your card. Then, emerge wireless-tools and use iwconfig. I used this link:

http://www.linuxonthego.com/articles.php?article=3com

Just ignore the stuff at the beginning on installing the card drivers, cardmgr should load them for you on your Belkin.

laclasse,
I saw your post on the 9000 drivers. Are you sure the commercial 9000 chip is the same as the Mobility chip?

[dirtboy]

Hardware and modules on the 8886 (might be the same for 5660):

Sound: Intel ICH i8xx
Video: Vesa (vesa FB works if tyou want high resolution console)
PCMCIA: TI 1520
USB: UHCI
Power: ACPI support
IDE: Intel PIIXn
Internal Lan: RealTek RTL-8139
AGP: Intel 440LX/etc.

I haven't gotten Firewire or Video for Linux working yet. Don't have any firewire devices and want to make sure the video drivers work first.

On the PCMCIA controlller, Dave at pcmcia-cs says he will be including an exception check for TI 1520 in the next beta to see if that allows it to work correctly.

[dirtboy]

Also, the USB smartcard reader (mp3 player) shows up as a SCSI mass storage device with emulation. I haven't actually tried to mount it yet.

[laclasse]

What X drivers were you running when the new QT crashed your display ? :confused:

[laclasse]

Requires usbcore, usb-serial, ide-scci and usb-storage compiled in or as modules. to mount a mass storage device try:
mount -t vfat /dev/sdaX /mnt/smartcard (after mkdir -p /mnt/smartcard of course ) where X is 0 to 4. My usb zip mounts on sda4, while my dig camera mounts on sda5. Reason is that zips need 3 ghost devices ( /dev/sda0 to /dev/sda3). In your case, the smartcard should "land" on /dev/sda0, if you have no other 'real' or 'emulated' SCSI storage devices. Hope that help ;)

[laclasse]

dirtboy,

Arghhh vesa, install real drivers ;)

[ROBOTHOUSE!]

I'm none too sure. On second thought, I think that my drop back to a suppported QT just fried my KDM ir KDE or whatever settings. I don't know how to fix em so I'm gonna start from scratch.

I was using an experimental version of xserver that had radeon video support, and my card was running at a managable rate, as opposed to the vesa drivers, if that helps any.

I figure you could try this by opening up emerge for experimental package use and emerging the newest xserver, but NOTHING else. You see everything was working peachy until I did an emerge --update world with the experimental package use still on.

Originally posted by laclasse
What X drivers were you running when the new QT crashed your display ? :confused:

[laclasse]

Ummm, the answer will have been to emerge all but the Xwindows system. Where you using X 4.2.99 ? Cause that is what i use on LFS and the DRI M9 driver works good. But you would have to build X manually, not emerging it. My friends use a radeon 9000 desktop and he told me that gentoo has an ati-driver package. emerge ati_drivers or something. If interested i can look into it for you.;)

[Icefluxx]

on another thread, there i was curious about a triple boot, done a dual plenty of times, not a triple though. win/mandrake win/freebsd win/suse win/redhat. So, is there any diff in the way a 2 os dual is installed from a 3 os install?

[skot]

I don't really think there is any difference between setting up a dual boot or a triple boot. I have done both. Long as you have a partition for it, I don't see a problem. I tripple booted win98/XP/Linux...and I don't see any reason why you couldn't boot as many different OS's as you want.

[laclasse]

Lilo, Grub can handle lots of different boots, you are only limited by the number of primary partition your hard drive can handle (4) considering any OS will require one. The most capable boot loader IMHO is the FreeBSD bootloader....There was this guy on an article in slashdot who was running somit like 39 OS plus somit like another 20 different DOS versions. Or was it 300 OS total ? :banana: :banana:

One more day passing, lappy will arrive ...soon

[ROBOTHOUSE!]

Yeah, tonight I'm going to re emerge qt and kde, which should fix all my problems... I talked to a local gentoo head.

As for the pcmcia stuff... I'm a little unclear of how to get to use the yenta_socket module... I'm guessing I'm not configuring my kernel quite properly. What and where are the options you are selecting dirtboy?


Sorry about sounding naggy! I'm just at the end of my rope with my senior design class.

[dirtboy]

Enable PCMCIA support, then enable Cardbus support. That should compile the yenta_socket module. Also go into network adapters and select the module you need for your card under PCMCIA network adapters. Then, after it boots, you can do these commands:

modprobe yenta_socket
modprobe ds
cardmgr -f

If that works and your card gets detected and all, you can add yenta_socket and ds to your /etc/modules.autoload file.

[ROBOTHOUSE!]

Now THAT makes alot more sense! :D Thanks dirtboy! I'll give it a try after work today.

[Icefluxx]

well, when installing mandrake, it reqs 2 partitions..wich will give me 3 total (win/mandrake) the mandrake asks for the /home and /boot..err is it the swap...my hangup i think is trying NOT to make the other linux partitions primary...thats what im trying to solve. I dont mind lilo being my boot manager at all. I just want to run win/man/suse. But, the systems requirements are asking for more..unless theres a way make more partitions without them bieng primary (i really dont want to use partition magic) except for the linux one.
cus normally, i just run a dual boot. triple is new.
Any takers on this?

[laclasse]

The rule is as follow. 4 Primary partitions per hard drive, 5 extended in each primary.

The soluce is to do:
/dev/hda1 NTFS WinXP Primary
/dev/hda2 ext2/ext3/reiserfs /(mdk root)
Primary
/dev/hda5 ext2/ext3/reiserfs /(suse root) Primary

all necessary /home, swap and other /usr partitions should be assigned under each primary root as EXTENDED partitions. Hope that help ;)

[Icefluxx]

the diff file systems are pretty overwhelming on mandrake when you first install, the default is cool, but i dont want to go that route.
so

/dev/hda2 ext2/ext3/reiserfs /(mdk root)

okay, could you expand on this a little further? Saying, my root is the riser file system?

thanx muchos

[laclasse]

Well basically, declare a partition as primary ( / ), then make an each other partitions as extended ( home, user, var etc ).

So it will look like this:

<hda1> primary <hda5(home), hda6(usr), hda7(var)>
Next Primary partition will be hda2. Hope that help.:banana: :banana: :banana:

[Icefluxx]

It went well, i actually got away with a /(boot) part and a /(root) part for drake...but now when i try to install suse, i get that 1024 error...my partition for suse is above that limit, and offers me a chance to change it. Should i wipe all or attempt to fix it? Now, i did not install lilo yet cuz i was going to install it with suse so that it would be able to read all my 0ses. What do you think laclasse (btw, the other tips helped biggs, thanx!)

[laclasse]

icefluxx,

Which Suse are ya trying to install ? 8.0, 8.1 ?
You must have an option to 'NOT TOUCH THE BOOTLOADER', so use it ;)

Install and run lilo from Mandrake. Close your comp, halt it, then put the SuSE CDs, install but DO NOT INSTALL a boot loader. Once installed, re boot in Mandrake, edit as root /etc/lilo.conf, add an entry for SuSE ( man lilo.conf will explain you the syntax to use ), save the file then run '/sbin/lilo' as root. It Sould say, Added Linux, Windows, Suse ( or whatever ya named it in lilo.conf) and return the prompt. If no mistake, you are mint. Now ya can reboot and choose SuSE , win or MDK ;)
Remember, ALWAYS run /sbin/lilo after changing the /etc/lilo.conf file, otherwise your changes will not be taken into account. Hope that helps ;)

Ps: Ya managed to create somit like :
hda1 Windows
hda2 Primary Mandrake
-hda5 /home ext
-hda6 /usr ext
-hda7 /var ext
hda3 Primary SuSE
-hda8 /home ext
- hda9 /usr ext
- hda10 /var ext

i hope so;) Let me know :banana:

[Icefluxx]

Suse 7.0...but in suse, now im getting an error...the over 1024 error...