Last updated Mar 20 2005
Processor AMD-K6 3D Processor 400MHz Chipset VIA MVP-4 Sound VIA 82Cxxx Video Trident CyberBlade/i7d Networking PCMCIA acx100(wifi), atheros(wifi) + USB 0100TX(eth) Modem Lucent v.90 56kbps software modem Memory 150mb SDRAM (added) HDD 10GB (original was only 4GB) Storage Floppy 1.44 and Toshiba XM-7002B 24x CD-ROM Display 13 inch HPA display Touchpad Synaptics PS/2
This is a second hand machine, I purchased it mainly for basic
internet tasks, wireless networking, the modem is rarely
used.
I know it's old but it suits my needs just fine, maybe a new
battery would be nice...
Output of lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8501 [Apollo MVP4] (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8501 [Apollo MVP4 AGP] 00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] (rev 19) 00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586/B/686A/B PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06) 00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 0a) 00:07.4 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 20) 00:09.0 Communication controller: Lucent Microelectronics 56k WinModem (rev 01) 00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1211 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i7d (rev 5c) 02:00.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 100 22Mbps Wireless Interface 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.1abg NIC (rev 01)
I'm running a vanilla 2.6.11.7 kernel, my config can be found here.
First I partitioned my hard drive.
Disk: /dev/hda Partitions: /dev/hda1 - 3,4G - ext3 - / /dev/hda3 - 3,5G - ext3 - /mnt/storage /dev/hda6 - 2,0G - ext3 - /usr/local /dev/hda5 - 0,5G - swap - swap space
I booted of the first Slackware CD, chosed the bare.i kernel, and
walked through the installation, I just did a full install
and
afterwards removed packages that I didn't need, yeah I know I am
lazy but there is another reason, when I'm in a hurry
it happened before that I overlook something, and since there is
no dependency checking in Slackware packaging system
stuff gets broken, and it's a lot bigger hasle to hunt it manualy
later.
I had a little truble running X with a 24 bit colour, it
rendered everything slowly and drew garbage when resizing
windows, I found
a solution in giving the graphic card more memory in BIOS, I set
it on 8MB and it worked fine ever since.
You can find my xorg.conf here.
As you can see from it I installed the synaptics touchpad driver,
The driver can be found (and the instructions) here,
as for setting it up feel free to copy the config from my
xorg.conf (which is setup for touchpad and USB mouse).
One more thing after I setup synaptics suddenly my scroll keys
situated below the touchpad worked, no luck yet with the
rest of the Internet Zone, see more about it below.
For quick changes and easy configuration you can also install Qsynaptics.
It's a VIA82cxxx integrated sound device. I just run alsaconf
and was ready in a matter of seconds.
Unfortunately my sound card 'died' after a while, now I carry my mp3
player around, and fill it up
with music from the hard drive.
This laptop comes without an ethernet card so I bought the USB
(since there is only one PCMCIA slot I reserved it for a wireless
card)
ethernet adapter from D-Link, it works fine with the pegasus
module.
The laptop comes with an integrated Lucent 56k WinModem,
detailed instructions and the drivers can be found here.
With the apm module loaded I get an resonably accurate battery
monitor in XFCE (or any other WM for that matter),
power saving features work fine. I can standby - suspend and
poweroff the machine,
I noticed an issue when suspending the machine while the PCMCIA
card is inserted, this can be patched but
I just unload the wireless card module before doing it (and I
suspend it rarely).
When I switched to 2.6.* kernel I switched to ACPI also, it
works great, and with acpid you can do some neat stuff.
These are the modules I use: battery, button, processor,
thermal. You could also install ACPI Client
which replicates
the behaviour of the old 'apm' command
This is how I set it up, added to rc.local:
/sbin/rmmod via686a # hotplug loads it automaticly, but...: /sbin/modprobe via686a force_addr=0x6000 # it was complaining, so I set other location /sbin/modprobe i2c-isa /sbin/modprobe i2c-dev /usr/local/bin/sensors -s # monitoring tool
You can find my /etc/sensors.conf here.
It's nice, I get CPU core voltage, temp, fan speed... ACPI's
thermal module gives CPU temp also but what the he..
:-)
I purchased a wireless network adapter from D-Link - DWL-650+
that uses a chip from Texas Instruments - acx100.
This chipset is fairly supported under linux, guys over at
acx100.sourceforge.net are
doing a great job.
It supports monitor mode so I am able to work with kismet, the
connection sometimes stays up for days, it's very stable for such
a cheap card.
A friend of mine has some fancy laptop with led indicators of
network traffic.
So I decided to setup something similar, I installed tleds (read the
instructions carefully if installing on a newer kernel).
Basicly it blinks keyboard LEDs (ScrollLock & NumLock)
indicating outgoing and incoming network packets on a selected
network interface.
I added to rc.local:
/usr/local/bin/tleds -qcd 150 wlan0
Currently what doesn't work are the Internet Zone buttons,
kernel is not mapping them at all, I didn't find a DSDT for my
laptop over at acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt.
Since I lack of skills to fix it my self it will stay unused,
maybe one day...
I would sugest to put one of these two images instead of that ugly sticker that comes shipped with the laptop: