On receiving the laptop, the first thing I did was to boot it under MEPIS. This found all the hardware and booted fine. A promising start! I installed MEPIS to the hard disk and then upgraded to Debian Unstable. This worked well, but managed to set the X screen back to 640x480. There were some other obvious issues at this point that would need solving:
Suspend / Resume did not work.
The Wireless LAN was not working
The video hardware was not supported by the XFree 4.3 in Debian.
3.6G of the disk was used up by the Protected Area with the IBM product recovery.
MEPIS also did not support XFS out of the box, and I wanted to use that for my filesystem too. My initial intention was to use the whole 60G hard drive for Linux (it's about 6 years since I had a dual-boot system) but in the end I decided to leave a small partition and do the “Product Recovery” thing into that, since I had been forced to pay the Microsoft Tax. Probably in a few months I'll wipe it all out because I need the space – especially likely since my current laptop also has a 60G drive which is 90% full!
I built a 2.6.3 kernel that supported the hardware and options I wanted, and then repartitioned as follows:
hda1 – 6G FAT32 for Windows (mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/hda1)
hda5 – 50M XFS filesystem for /boot
hda6 – 2000M for swap
hda7 – 48G XFS filesystem for the rest
(protected area) – 3599.77M – IBM Product Recovery
I did this all using Knoppix 3.3, which does support XFS. Interestingly Knoppix didn't care about the protected area, and cfdisk saw it as “Free Space”, so I had to be careful not to wipe it out accidentally. Knowing that cfdisk showed it as 3599.77MB at the end of the disk was useful!
After booting Knoppix, I formatted hda5 and hda7 as XFS, mounted them under /mnt and /mnt/boot and debootstrapped a basic Debian Sid installation:
mkfs.xfs /dev/hda5 mkfs.xfs/dev/hda7 mount /dev/hda7 /mnt mkdir /mnt/boot mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/boot debootstrap sid /mnt http://linux.citylink.co.nz/debian
During this process, I discovered that Knoppix appears to manage to suspend / resume correctly so I will need to investigate that further... Also, the debootstrap didn't work correctly – presumably the “sid” bootstrap in Knoppix was not quite a correct list packages – and I had to go into the chroot, set the /etc/apt/sources.list to something valid and “apt-get -f install” to fix things.
I then put the 2.6.3 kernel image that I had built earlier into the chroot, installed grub, booted into my new system and started furiously installing all the packages needed for a working system.
Searching ATI's website you would certainly get the impression that they don't want you to download drivers from them. For mobiles they strongly suggest you go to your mobile manufacturer. At IBM's website a search for “Linux R50p drivers” gives 8 results, none of which seem to have the word “Linux” in them. In passing I note that there is a recommended firmware upgrade for the 60G drive. Since the machine has no floppy perhaps I will be booting Windows sooner than I thought...
One has to wonder what sort of ongoing damage ATI are doing to their reputation in their poor commitment to Linux support. Certainly I will switch to using Open Source drivers ASAP, an I would not recommend an ATI to anyone using Linux. NVidia are also closed source drivers, but they do show a greater commitment to at least releasing working drivers on a reasonable timeframe that will work with any distribution. Ignore 10% of your market, and you give someone else the opportunity of 0wning that 10%, as a base where they need not compete.
Anyway, after a bit of googling I learn that I need to be freer with the truth. Returning to the ATI website, I just lie and say I have a Radeon 9700. Once downloaded these drivers do admit to working fine with the Radeon Mobility, and indeed I have not had significant issues with them.
One of the reasons I went for the IBM model I picked (other than my fantastic three years with my A21p :-) was because it isn't a Centrino. I wasn't sure exactly what it was before it arrived, but it turns out to be an Atheros chipset. This is OK, because there are some “mostly open source” drivers for it called MADWIFI. I got the latest CVS for these, built them against my kernel source and everything worked.
As it stands the power management seems to work unreliably, or not at all, under ACPI. In the next few days I will build another kernel with APM and ACPI as modules, and will see if APM works.
A little more playing around shows me that ACPI works to suspend to RAM, and appears to work for suspend to disk, but acpid is not acting on the lid, power or suspend keys. This is using the VESA drivers and a kernel with APIC turned off.
Somewhere during my googling I read a report that the ATI drivers don't support DGA or Xv and so aren't good for DVD playback. I'll try it out and report here whether I end up using them, or the VESA drivers.
You can download some of the kernels and modules I use from here
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