Just figured I'd slide this up as I had a fair bit of success with it.
I had begun my linux on the 5680 chore by partitioning off a 10G block on the HDD and attempting to put Gentoo on it. I was following the standby two-partition dealio, whereby I have one root partition, one swap partition, and that's it.
I installed Gentoo without too much of a hitch, using the GRP discs. Got to the point where I had to install a boot manager, and here's where the trouble started.
I chose to use Grub, as apparently that's what all the cool kids use these days and I don't want to be the only one that's not cuffing his jeans. Installing Grub, got some weird messages when attempting to run ( along the lines of : Device error, FD0 (0xmm) ) where mm is some hex.
Got this every time I ran grub ; and, appropriately enough, when I rebooted after installing grub ( successfully ) , it would hang at the "booting into Stage 1.5" doo-dad. So, I tried running grub-install, thinking the dash-install addition would help. While it, of course, did not, it did add a devices.map to the /boot/grub directory.
Digression: I had removed the 1.44MB floppy drive and had the secondary battery installed. It did not occur to me to put the floppy back in until the devices.map stage.
In devices.map, there were two entries:
(hd0) and (fd0) - therefore, I shutdown the laptop, put the floppy back in, installed Grub sucessfully, and booted the computer with Grub running fine. Then, I removed the (fd0) entry from devices.map, because I have an unreasoning hatred of floppy disks. Then, I got some water.
At this point, with the secondary battery installed, Grub still worked fine and I didn't have to break down and try doing that NT Bootloader witchery.
I say all this so far because, at some point, you will probably want to install a boot loader, and in all my searching for help on the topic of Grub hanging at boot, there was not one useful source of information on my particular problem. So, give me a cookie.
Now, Slackware...
I won't go into why I chose Slackware over Gentoo, let's just not talk about it because I'm already far more verbose than is useful...
So, Slackware installed pretty much without a hitch over everything else, blah blah, if you've installed Linux then you can get this far without your head exploding / family dying.
Okay, some useful information:
5680 Integrated Ethernet: uses the Realtek 8169 driver, in the gigabit ethernet controllers section of the kernel. Slackware recognized at install. The 2.4.2x branch, therefore, supports the 8169, as does the 2.6 kernel. Should you wish to be a masochist, Realtek has drivers on their homepage as well.
Audio: i810 ICH audio using the AC97 codec. No problems here, except that of course, using the 2.4 OSS sound modules, sound output is blocking. ( eg, playing one sound prevents any other sound from playing until it releases the sound device )
USB: I don't have any USB 2.0 devices, so I couldn't test the transfer rate / etc. , but in X, my Kensington Wireless Ninjamouse worked fine ( pointing to /dev/input/mouse0, and yes, that device branch path is the result of supporting the HID input model in kernel ). This of course brings us on to..
XFree86 / ATI M10: Okay, I wasn't quite sure how to deal with this at first as it seemed everyone had a different favorite way to add support for the ATI Radeon cards to X. Some people suggested dri.sourceforge.net, other people suggested the "official" drivers at atitech.com.
I, being a useless corporate sellout whore, decided to use the "officially official" drivers from ATI. Of course, they are packaged in RPM format, so usage in Slackware necessitates the whole "rpm2tgz" thing, that turns that RPM into a tarball. Extract the tarball, go into build ( or something similar ) subdirectory of the extracted directory and run the make script ( eg. sh make.sh ) . If your kernel is set up right ( see below ) , it will compile a new kernel module for you and tell you to run the install script in the directory just below ( cd .. ; sh make_install.sh ).
Digression: You should have DRI compiled into your kernel before doing this. You have the option of using the ATI officially official AGP support in driver, so you may want to just have AGPGART support compiled in via modules, so as to have it available but not create any potential conflicts with the ATI drivers. Also, when you compile in DRI support, you may be tempted to compile in Radeon DRI support to the kernel ; this is the devil talking. You should compile it as a module instead.
Okay, so if all this is done correctly, and that make_install script test loaded the module successfully, then you can add the whole
/sbin/modprobe fglrx
thing to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules . Next, you'll wanna copy the contents of the bin directory of the fglrx package ( the stuff like fireglcontrol, fglrxconfig, fglrxgears, fglrxinfo, etc. ) to your /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or c:\Windows\System32 or whatever. fglrxconfig is what you'll want to run directly after this, as this will walk you through the whole X Configuration thing. I pulled this off without a hitch, but since I don't feel like talking about it, I'll just say that if it doesn't work first try for you, keep trying different configuration alternatives and you'll get it.
( Probably, I'm speaking more out of optimism than experience. If your computer catches on fire, I never heard of ya. )
Okay, so X starts up fine in 1600x1200, you've got all sorts of pretty colors, now you want to make the computer spit out some numbers that tell you that the $2,000+ you spent on this crazy laptop thing makes you a better person than someone else who gets less numbers.
Unfortunately, in attempting to do so by running fglrxgears ( a small little app that displays a 3d model being operated upon, and gives you the frame rate that it achieves ) , I noticed I was at a ceiling of 60fps. This was, as you can imagine, a little disconcerting, as the amount of money I had paid for the laptop required my magic numbers to be at least 350x greater than that. Research into the topic ( google: 60fps ati m10 glxgears ) showed that the framerate was syncing with the refresh rate of the monitor. At this point, I decided to ensure that any linux games ( hahahhahahahahahha ) I should choose to play would run successfully, so downloaded some demos from Garagegames, and tried them out ( http://www.garagegames.com/ ) . They ran fine, which made me happy.
I've probably spent a lot more than I should on the topic, and wasted a fair bit of your time by now, so I'll do it some more: if you bought a Linksys wireless PCMCIA 802.11g card ( aka the WPC54G ) ( whether from the store or from PCTorque, like I did ), there is no Linux support for this card yet. The chipset maker, Broadcom, has declined to offer any word of whether or not they would release drivers, specifications, full color brochures, ice cream cones, whatever. You could probably try to reverse engineer the Windows driver ( whether by sitting on the PCMCIA bus and watching what goes back and forth, disassembling the windows drivers and going crazy reading assembly, etc. ) had you the requisite technical knowledge, so, uh....do that, please.
60FPS IN FGLRXGEARS BITCHES!
I had begun my linux on the 5680 chore by partitioning off a 10G block on the HDD and attempting to put Gentoo on it. I was following the standby two-partition dealio, whereby I have one root partition, one swap partition, and that's it.
I installed Gentoo without too much of a hitch, using the GRP discs. Got to the point where I had to install a boot manager, and here's where the trouble started.
I chose to use Grub, as apparently that's what all the cool kids use these days and I don't want to be the only one that's not cuffing his jeans. Installing Grub, got some weird messages when attempting to run ( along the lines of : Device error, FD0 (0xmm) ) where mm is some hex.
Got this every time I ran grub ; and, appropriately enough, when I rebooted after installing grub ( successfully ) , it would hang at the "booting into Stage 1.5" doo-dad. So, I tried running grub-install, thinking the dash-install addition would help. While it, of course, did not, it did add a devices.map to the /boot/grub directory.
Digression: I had removed the 1.44MB floppy drive and had the secondary battery installed. It did not occur to me to put the floppy back in until the devices.map stage.
In devices.map, there were two entries:
(hd0) and (fd0) - therefore, I shutdown the laptop, put the floppy back in, installed Grub sucessfully, and booted the computer with Grub running fine. Then, I removed the (fd0) entry from devices.map, because I have an unreasoning hatred of floppy disks. Then, I got some water.
At this point, with the secondary battery installed, Grub still worked fine and I didn't have to break down and try doing that NT Bootloader witchery.
I say all this so far because, at some point, you will probably want to install a boot loader, and in all my searching for help on the topic of Grub hanging at boot, there was not one useful source of information on my particular problem. So, give me a cookie.
Now, Slackware...
I won't go into why I chose Slackware over Gentoo, let's just not talk about it because I'm already far more verbose than is useful...
So, Slackware installed pretty much without a hitch over everything else, blah blah, if you've installed Linux then you can get this far without your head exploding / family dying.
Okay, some useful information:
5680 Integrated Ethernet: uses the Realtek 8169 driver, in the gigabit ethernet controllers section of the kernel. Slackware recognized at install. The 2.4.2x branch, therefore, supports the 8169, as does the 2.6 kernel. Should you wish to be a masochist, Realtek has drivers on their homepage as well.
Audio: i810 ICH audio using the AC97 codec. No problems here, except that of course, using the 2.4 OSS sound modules, sound output is blocking. ( eg, playing one sound prevents any other sound from playing until it releases the sound device )
USB: I don't have any USB 2.0 devices, so I couldn't test the transfer rate / etc. , but in X, my Kensington Wireless Ninjamouse worked fine ( pointing to /dev/input/mouse0, and yes, that device branch path is the result of supporting the HID input model in kernel ). This of course brings us on to..
XFree86 / ATI M10: Okay, I wasn't quite sure how to deal with this at first as it seemed everyone had a different favorite way to add support for the ATI Radeon cards to X. Some people suggested dri.sourceforge.net, other people suggested the "official" drivers at atitech.com.
I, being a useless corporate sellout whore, decided to use the "officially official" drivers from ATI. Of course, they are packaged in RPM format, so usage in Slackware necessitates the whole "rpm2tgz" thing, that turns that RPM into a tarball. Extract the tarball, go into build ( or something similar ) subdirectory of the extracted directory and run the make script ( eg. sh make.sh ) . If your kernel is set up right ( see below ) , it will compile a new kernel module for you and tell you to run the install script in the directory just below ( cd .. ; sh make_install.sh ).
Digression: You should have DRI compiled into your kernel before doing this. You have the option of using the ATI officially official AGP support in driver, so you may want to just have AGPGART support compiled in via modules, so as to have it available but not create any potential conflicts with the ATI drivers. Also, when you compile in DRI support, you may be tempted to compile in Radeon DRI support to the kernel ; this is the devil talking. You should compile it as a module instead.
Okay, so if all this is done correctly, and that make_install script test loaded the module successfully, then you can add the whole
/sbin/modprobe fglrx
thing to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules . Next, you'll wanna copy the contents of the bin directory of the fglrx package ( the stuff like fireglcontrol, fglrxconfig, fglrxgears, fglrxinfo, etc. ) to your /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or c:\Windows\System32 or whatever. fglrxconfig is what you'll want to run directly after this, as this will walk you through the whole X Configuration thing. I pulled this off without a hitch, but since I don't feel like talking about it, I'll just say that if it doesn't work first try for you, keep trying different configuration alternatives and you'll get it.
( Probably, I'm speaking more out of optimism than experience. If your computer catches on fire, I never heard of ya. )
Okay, so X starts up fine in 1600x1200, you've got all sorts of pretty colors, now you want to make the computer spit out some numbers that tell you that the $2,000+ you spent on this crazy laptop thing makes you a better person than someone else who gets less numbers.
Unfortunately, in attempting to do so by running fglrxgears ( a small little app that displays a 3d model being operated upon, and gives you the frame rate that it achieves ) , I noticed I was at a ceiling of 60fps. This was, as you can imagine, a little disconcerting, as the amount of money I had paid for the laptop required my magic numbers to be at least 350x greater than that. Research into the topic ( google: 60fps ati m10 glxgears ) showed that the framerate was syncing with the refresh rate of the monitor. At this point, I decided to ensure that any linux games ( hahahhahahahahahha ) I should choose to play would run successfully, so downloaded some demos from Garagegames, and tried them out ( http://www.garagegames.com/ ) . They ran fine, which made me happy.
I've probably spent a lot more than I should on the topic, and wasted a fair bit of your time by now, so I'll do it some more: if you bought a Linksys wireless PCMCIA 802.11g card ( aka the WPC54G ) ( whether from the store or from PCTorque, like I did ), there is no Linux support for this card yet. The chipset maker, Broadcom, has declined to offer any word of whether or not they would release drivers, specifications, full color brochures, ice cream cones, whatever. You could probably try to reverse engineer the Windows driver ( whether by sitting on the PCMCIA bus and watching what goes back and forth, disassembling the windows drivers and going crazy reading assembly, etc. ) had you the requisite technical knowledge, so, uh....do that, please.
60FPS IN FGLRXGEARS BITCHES!
