As a computer science master student, I was increasingly feeling the need to carry my data and resources along. Something that would help getting rid of those "Damn, if only I had a computer, I could...". I needed a laptop. Some efficient, affordable machine whose first quality would be to run Linux. It's been a while since I made the jump to Linux, and I really need it for work, and many other uses.
The ze4234s shined into my face like it was THE right thing at the right moment. Relatively powerful and inexpensive, and a very good machine in my opinion. No floppy drive, no burner and no FireWire, but you just can't ask for too much. All components are very high quality in my opinion, and the notebook overall is well worth its price. The display is quite impressive, very sharp and clear. The touchpad is also among the best I've ever used, with a separated vertical track that emulates the mouse wheel. And the whole machine is just beautiful; the case has a nice finish and incorporates blue LEDs that, together with its design, give it a slightly futuristic look. I may be way off subject here, but this laptop is a sexy one :)
My distribution of choice is now Mandrake Linux 10. It's a well-thought one, very flexible, very complete, and LSB-certified. MDK distributions come with well-designed tools that greatly help you configuring your system, still it can be used and configured "the real way", if you feel like a power-user today. Considering that owning a Linux laptop must be a relief more than a hassle, I think MDK is optimal. Lets your laptop ready as soon as you need it, and still packs all the power and features of the Linux system.
MDK 10 is following the excellent trend of the Mandrake 9 series; the bigger improvements may not be clearly visible to the end user (2.6 kernel), but the interface is constantly being refined. With the integration of KDE 3.2, it becomes a serious competitor in the fight for the desktop market. And oh God, it just looks great.
In a way, I ran Linux on my laptop before buying it... well, being aware that
it might be a challenge, I went shopping with MDK CD-ROMs and started testing a
few laptops in front of the puzzled salesman.
The ze4234s was my nicest pull on that day; out of three or four laptops, it was the
only one that could boot the Install CD. I could never get others to boot, even
when passing command-line arguments to the kernel (if you have trouble running
a Linux kernel on that kind of machine, there are some things you can always
try, like nopcmcia or mem=<memory size>).
So what have we learned today? Try before you buy!
Installation was a breeze. In fact, Mandrake Linux installed without problems.
I configured the touchpad as a standard PS/2 mouse with wheel, and it was just
fine - only lacking a middle mouse button, but these are rare on laptops. However, use of the Emulate3Buttons feature is easy, as the touchpad buttons are placed right next to each other and can easily be pressed simultaneously.
Using diskdrake, I quickly deleted the partition of the pre-loaded Windows XP
system. No proprietary utility partition on that laptop -- that's good. Then I
partitionned the drive and left a little less than half of it free, so I
would reinstall WinXP on it later. The rest was divided into two logical drives;
the Linux root ext3 filesystem on /dev/hda5, and a ~320 MB swap
partition (useful for Software Suspend).
The installer autodetected my graphics card and installed XFree86 4.3 with the
radeon driver. Hardware acceleration was automatically enabled.
The sound board was detected and ran fine with module snd-ali5451.o, but you may prefer trident.o.
There was no problem detecting the Ethernet controller, either; it works fine
with module natsemi.o. However, I had the opportunity to notice that the
Knoppix 3.3 distribution, although it uses this very same module, fails to bring
up the Ethernet interface correctly. I still have to look further into it.
There is an annoyance about the keyboard. While I had no problem with it at LILO prompt
or under Linux, I noticed the keyboard (internal or external) would not work in-between. That is,
for example, when booting the MDK CD in rescue mode, keyboard input seems completely disabled.
The same happens when you have to answer 'y' to an fsck prompt while booting.
This problem was solved by turning off the USB legacy device option in the BIOS setup. The only problem is that it won't boot from a USB device after that. Better go with a Knoppix CD as an emergency bootdisk :)
Thanks to kernel 2.6, fixing the buggy OZ6912 is now very easy. The only thing you have to do to prevent the laptop from hard-locking on card insertion is to edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts and replace the "exclude irq" lines by the following ones:
exclude irq 1 exclude irq 2 exclude irq 3 exclude irq 4 exclude irq 8 exclude irq 9 exclude irq 10 exclude irq 11 exclude irq 12 exclude irq 13 exclude irq 14 exclude irq 15
If you are still running the 2.4 series, well, consider upgrading :)
Another solution would be to recompile your kernel and the pcmcia-cs package as explained in Norm Kravatz's page.
Just to be safe when installing your distribution, be sure to disable the pcmcia service on start. You may change that later when you have the problem fixed with a new config file or kernel. If you have mistakenly enabled the pcmcia daemon with ACPI on in a new Mandrake installation, you can still bypass this by booting it in interactive mode; just press 'I' when asked to do so.
Both methods were tested successfully with a NetGear MA401 wireless NIC.
The modem is an ALi M5457 AC-link, based on a Conexant HSF chipset. It will work with the latest Linuxant drivers. The problem is that Linuxant now charges an awful $14.95 for those. You can you use the latest free beta of their driver, which works perfectly with kernel 2.4. This RPM will automatically compile a kernel module for you.
Unless you run on 2.6 series and have a desperate need for this modem, I suggest that you boycott the newer, non-free versions. The very idea of charging money for a device driver is insane.
MDK 10 seems to run with ACPI off as a default; however ACPI was easily configured. You should just remove the acpi=ht option in lilo.conf, or have drakboot do it for you. After booting the kernel with ACPI support, one may have to load some modules (ac, battery, button, fan, processor, thermal) to access the various features. I'm now using the Window Maker dockapp wmpower to monitor CPU temperature and battery status. A push on the power button triggers shutdown. Pretty good.
If enabling ACPI causes your laptop to freeze at startup, please see the BIOS section below.
In addition to this, you can use Cpufreq to dynamically adjust your CPU frequency. The Athlon 1700+ can be set on-the-fly to 533, 667, 800, 1200 or 1466 MHz. Here is how you do it:
echo userspace > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor echo 600000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed
As you guess, the frequency must be given in kHz.
If you would like to use the automatic modes:
echo performance > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
or
echo powersave > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
(you may need a modprobe cpufreq_powersave before this one)
ACPI support in kernel 2.6 is far better than in previous distributions. It allows your laptop to run much cooler on AC, and drastically extends battery life. Numbers will be a lot more explicit;
| Distribution | Avg. temp. (AC) | Max. batt. life | Fan |
|---|---|---|---|
| MDK <= 9.1 | 70 °C | 2 hours | never stops |
| MDK 9.2 | 40 to 50 °C | 3 hours | starts at 50 °C, stops at 40 °C |
| MDK 10 on cpufreq powersave mode | 40 to 45 °C | 3 to 4 hours | almost never heard! |
Another great improvement is the integration of swsusp in the Mandrake kernel. Provided you've set up a large enough swap partition, you can now back up your computer state to disk and automatically resume it at the next boot - just like MS Windows "hibernation" feature. Swsusp works quite well, although it may require some adjustments (see /etc/sysconfig/suspend and /etc/sysconfig/suspend-scripts/suspend.d/*). You can suspend to disk using the pmsuspend2 command. There seem to be issues when it is symlinked, so run it directly. If you ever have a problem resuming from a corrupt image, just boot your system with the noresume flag at the LILO prompt. Linux will boot as usual, only swsusp data will be lost.
The One-Touch application keys are mapped to specific keyboard codes. It is possible
to configure some of them using xbindkeys.
Only 2 out of the 5 multimedia shortcut buttons will work (Mail and Browser).
The volume setting buttons will work too, excepted the Mute command.
Here is my .xbindkeysrc file:
"mozilla -mail"
m:0x0 + c:236
"mozilla"
m:0x0 + c:178
"aumix -v+5"
m:0x0 + c:176
"aumix -v-5"
m:0x0 + c:174
There are some issues depending on the BIOS version. Should you upgrade? If you want to, you may have to upgrade your kernel as well. Although the operation may be risky, I recommend upgrading your BIOS in order to benefit from bug fixes and new features. I have flashed my laptop BIOS 20 to 30 times, and never had a problem with the bootdisk version of the HP BIOS upgrade. Winflash upgrades aren't always safe, but bootdisks usually are. Just follow carefully the instructions.
And I guess you've been warned enough, so don't sue me if you kill your laptop!
Anyway, let's take a look at those versions:
nolapic option is given on boot. Thanks, for the good news, Gianni :)It's gonna be OK if you use kernel 2.4. Tap-to-click and wheel emulation work out-of-the-box.
If you run a 2.6, you need to load the evdev module, (you may want to add it to /etc/modprobe.preload), and install this driver.
The list would be too long. modem, sound, DVD playback, USB...
Direct Rendering Infrastructure is used for fullscreen accelerated
graphics; but Xlib returns a DRI extension missing
on GL applications startup. It looks like Radeon Mobility support is not
completely implemented. Some people have e-mailed me about patches that solve this (thanks, Michael!), but recompiling parts of XFree is not a trivial thing to do... I may try it on some day when I feel brave :) This does not affect DVD playback.
If you feel like you're on a lucky day, try getting the pre-compiled XFree86 modules. I couldn't get these to work myself.
Not supported yet. I tested atitvout, but it did not give any results with the Radeon Mobility chipset.
No comments. We need a clever hacker to reverse-engineer it...
Author: Matt - matt at tacticalgames dot org - Last revision: 2004-03-10