Jacek Pliszka's notebook's page

First look on these pages: http://www.linux-laptop.net/ andhttp://www.tuxmobil.org/ (This was formerly Mobilix but due to stupid German courts and greedy Asterix&Obelix lawyers it was forced to change its name, please do not buy any Asterix&Obelix products as the money you pay to them are used in a bad way).

Separate pages

to be done: HP Compaq nc6000
HP Pavillion ZE4100 (may work for other Celeron/P4 models with similar specs: ALI chipset, ATI graphics, DDR)
HP Pavillion ZE4101 (may work for other Athlon/Duron models with similar specs: ALI chipser, ATI graphics, DDR)
Toshiba Satellite 1005-S157 (may work for other models with simialr specs: Celeron/PIII around 1GHz, Intel i830MG, SDRAM)
Compaq Armada M700 - nice relatively slim and light - Linux-friendly and fully featured notebook
Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 - this is not a notebook but a Linux-based PDA
IBM Thinkpad T40

External mouse and keyboard

If you have external PS2 devices it should work with no problems. The only problem is mouse configuration as it may be different for built-in and for external mouse. My suggestion is to get a USB mouse. Then you can make two entries in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier "XFree86 Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Mouse1" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

# .. skipped
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse0"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/mouse"
        Option          "Protocol"              "PS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "yes"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse1"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mouse0"
        Option          "Protocol"              "MouseManPlusPS/2"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection

And both devices work as they should. Alternatively, instead of /dev/input/mouse0 you can use /dev/input/mice.

Audio

If your notebook has incompatible audio - get a USB audio device. For $40 you can get Labtec Axis 712 - USB headset with microphone which works great in full-duplex mode. More info here.

USB

USB is a great thing for notebooks - they could be much better desktop replacement thanks to that. I have external USB 2.0 case which I use for CD-recorder or a hard drive. I have many (10+) USB devices and they all work with Linux. For more info look here.

Battery status

If you have APM on notebook - use apm. If you have ACPI you should compile kernel with ACPI support. Then you can use this simple PyGNOME applet. If you do not want to or can't and your notebook is Toshiba 3k, 1005 or similar - try this simple hack written by Ducrot Bruno and slightly improved by me. Remember to compile with -O2. Do not use if ACPI is enabled in your kernel! Do not run more than one program at the same time! < And this is a simple PyGNOME applet I wrote which calls /usr/bin/battery ( assume it has an s bit) and which displays the battery status on the panel.

Partition resizing

works great with free parted (included on most installation CDs) provided that the filesystem you want to resize is not NTFS. If it is there are several options - delete and reinstall Windows or use BootIt Next Generation or use Ranish PArtition Manager or use Partition Magic

Linux as menu in Windows XP

A useful hint for those who want to have Linux as a menu item in windows XP (for example due to common Windows reinstalls). I do not use it as I barely use XP (just DVD watching and Yahoo messenger).

Windows "recovery" CD

If you bought a new notebook it is very likely that you vendor cheats together with Microsoft and they do not give you installation CDs - only recovery CD. In my case it was Toshiba - and they cheated. The recovery CD destroys the whole hard drive! (Funny what Toshiba and Microsoft mean by recovery). I wanted to return Windows and get the refund for that but they refused and claimed that I can return it only with the whole computer. I had no time to argue longer so I was left with Windows CD. Normally I do not use Windows at all. But unfortunately sometimes when you buy hardware and it does not work with Linux you need to check whether problem is with Linux driver or with the device. For me I installed windows when I needed to upgrade firmware on my wireless access point. This is how I managed to get through the Toshiba recovery CD without destroying my precious Linux.

I found some web pages with hints (here links) and I followed them:

Install Linux. During that create the 1st partition as vfat. he first partition has to be at the beginning of the drive
Boot Windows "recovery" CD and do not agree! Cancel at the first sight.
got to drive Q:
format C:
fdisk /mbr
\bin\cenv.bat
cd \base
os.bat

However I was also very successful with just Q:, cd \base, os.bat. Install Windows and then boot from Linux installation CD and go to recovery mode and use grub-install or lilo to recover the boot record.

If dual boot does not work for you with grub - this is a hint from Sachin Vaidya: in /etc/grub.conf add unhide and makeactive lines:

unhide (hd0,0) 
rootnoverity (hd0,0) 
chainloader +1.
makeactive

Extra keys

Just assign them in control-panel if you use GNOME. If hey have just keycodes - assing for exampel F21 to them following this short article..

Hardware experience

Here I described my experiences with notebooks I had/played with. I've installed Linux on: Compaq Contura 430?, AST Ascentia 950N, Compaq LTE5300, Dell Inspiron 3500, HP Omnibook 4150 (my favorite), Dell Latitude M233XT (also very nice one) and Toshiba Satellite 1005-S157 and I have helped with some other.

Common problem is that notebook hangs when PCMCIA card is inserted. This is because of autoprobing hitting some fragile adress in your memory. Try disabling some memory ranges in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts. In case of Compaq Contura disabling 0xc0000-0xd000f sometimes helps. Ensure in what range is your card and don't disable this range. Another problem is that in 2.4.25 and newer modproble does not accept file.o, only file argument. You need to fix /etc/init.d/pcmcia for that in some distributions.

Toshiba Portege DVD playback

Very useful hint is here

General info

My ranking of notebook manufacturers:

HP
Toshiba
Dell
AST
Compaq

Why HP? Well, I had HP Omnibook 4150 - fantastic model. Comparing to Inspiron 3500 (or 3000): slimmer, sligthly lighter, much prettier, both point stick and touch pad, ports in better locations. My new Toshiba in comparison looks cheap, lacks many ports (like ps2), has worse locations for existing ones (power from the back), speakers are in worse locations, no point stick, heavier and bigger (though screen the same size) - but from what I checked it is common for all manufacturers below $2000.

Jacek Pliszka

Last modified: Tue Jan 20 20:29:14 CET 2004