This page documents my experiences getting RedHat Linux 8.0
(Psyche) working on my Dell
Latitude C400 laptop. If you're interested in doing this, you should
also take a look at these other pages about this machine:
RPMFind is tremendously useful
for, um, finding RPMs of course
Overall Linux works very nicely on this machine -- it's a vast relief after
attempting to use the bewildering Windows XP for a few hours.
Windows is mighty pretty, but I can't work out how to make it do
anything. Like, for example, where is the editor? Every operating
system has to have an editor of some sort, right? Wrong.
Anyway, Linux runs well on the Dell, with only one caveat. Suspend-to-RAM,
which used to work on this machine in RedHat 7.3, is partially broken in
version 8.0. (It only works if you do a suspend-to-disk first.) No one
really appears to know why this is, but it's widely reported. Other than
that, everything works.
As usual, these notes are merely a document of things that worked for me.
There's no guarantee they will work for you, and there are some things you
could do while installing Linux that would really mess up your computer
bad. I'm not aware of anything that will do that other than
flashing your BIOS, which I don't recommend, but hey, you never know. You
have been warned. All opinions expressed here are those of the author and
have nothing to do with the University of Michigan. Obviously.
Installation
Installation was smooth, but it's a little complicated if you want to use
suspend-to-disk. (If you don't, it's trivial.) To use suspend-to-disk
with this machine you need to create a special partition that will store
the contents of the system memory when you suspend. To do this Dell
provides a utility called mks2d, which you can download from their support
website here.
Here's what you do. First use a utility like DOS fdisk (which comes on the
RedHat CDs) to delete any existing partitions on the hard drive (thereby,
usefully, getting rid of Windows in the process; if you want to keep
Windows, you can always reinstall it from the CD afterwards). Then boot
from floppy and run mks2d. The program can recommend a size for the
suspend partition, or you can set it yourself. I had read that the
automatic calculation was not entirely reliable, so I set it myself to
550MB, which should be plenty on my 512MB machine -- the recommended value
was about 540MB. You do this by typing mks2d -p550M at the
DOS prompt. This creates a suspend partition that will appear as /dev/hda1
in Linux-world.
Next, plug in the external CD-ROM drive that comes with the machine, put
the first RedHat CD in it, and reboot. While the system is rebooting press
F12 which will pull up the boot menu. Select "CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive" to boot
from the CD. Then RedHat will boot and go into the standard installation
routine. It is safe to select the default graphical install. Things all
proceed as normal. Select "2-button PS/2 mouse" for the pointing device.
Click on the "Emulate 3 buttons" box if you want pressing both buttons to
be like the middle button on a 3-button mouse.
When you get to the part about partitioning the disk, you may want to do a
manual partitioning yourself. The first partition is used up by the
suspend-to-disk. The second one should be your /boot partition, for which
100MB is ample. Then I made a swap partition of 1GB, and two filesystem
partitions together in an extended partition, one for / and one for /home.
I used ext3 for everything, which is the RedHat default. I made /
generously large -- about 10GB. I did a full install of all packages which
is about 5GB in this version of RedHat, but the OS gets bigger with each
version, so it pays to allow plenty of room for later upgrades.
The installer will also ask you where you want to put the boot loader. As
far as I know you can use either Grub or Lilo (I used Lilo), but it
must be installed on the boot record of your /boot partition (which
is probably /dev/hda2) if you made a suspend-to-disk partition as described
above. The default behavior is to put the boot loader on the Master Boot
Record (MBR) at the beginning of the disk, but if you do this, it will
break suspend-to-disk. So don't. Select the option to put it on the /boot
partition. The installer will automatically set the bootable flag for the
/boot partition, so that the computer will know to boot from that partition
and not from the Master Boot Record. (You can make it work if you
install the loader on the MBR, but it requires you to set up extra boot
options in the loader to allow you to choose whether to boot from the
suspend partition or the /boot partition, and you also have to remember for
yourself how you last shut the machine down -- see here.
This sounds like a real pain. If you just install the loader on /boot then
everything will be automatic.)
Select the packages you want, and watch it go. It takes about an hour to
install everything. Then it'll ask you about X configuration. At this
point select 8-bit color. This is important. We choose 8-bit at this
point, and switch to 24-bit later. If you select anything other than 8-bit
during the install, X will not work. This is because the default version
of X only supports 8-bit color on this machine. You have to upgrade to a
newer version as described below to get the 24-bit support. Also select
the Dell 1024 laptop panel as your display.
Note that the CD-ROM drive and the floppy both use the same port on the
side of the Dell, and you can't unplug the CD-ROM and plug in the floppy in
mid-install. So you'll have to skip making a boot floppy. If you want to
make one, then wait until you have the install complete and the machine's
up and running, then su root and run mkbootdisk.
When the install is done, reboot the machine and you should have a pretty
complete working system.
Tricks
X configuration: As mentioned above, the version of X shipped
with RedHat 8.0 only supports 8-bit color on this machine. That's
obviously a pain, so what you do is you install first with 8-bit color, and
then once everything's working, you upgrade to get 24-bit color. This is
easy to do. RPMs of the latest version of X, which work perfectly with
this machine, are available in the "Rawhide" development version of RedHat.
You can download them from here.
Download all RPMs that begin "XFree86", which is quite a few, then leave
X and go to a regular console before typing rpm -U
XFree86* as root. (If you run X by default, i.e., runlevel 5, then
in order to force the machine to leave X, you'll need to type telinit
3 as root.) Then reboot (restarts various things) and you will have
24-bit support. You'll need to check your /etc/X11/XF86Config (or
XF86Config-4) file to make sure you have a "Display" subsection for 24 bit
in the "Screen" section, and you'll have to change the line that says
DefaultDepth 8 to DefaultDepth 24 to actually see
the difference.
I should mention that there are two (possibly three) other ways to get
24-bit support. One is that you can patch and recompile X for yourself,
rather than using the RPMs. Instructions for doing this, should you want
to, can be found here. (It's
pretty complicated.) Another way is to buy this commercial X server that supports the
C400. It costs about US$100. A third possibility (which you attempt, as
always, completely at your own risk) is to upgrade your BIOS to version A08
or later, which can be downloaded from here.
(If you have a really new C400, you may already have this latest version of
the BIOS installed. Check the boot screen, which has a line telling you
which version you are running, or go to the BIOS setup page by typing
Fn-F1.) According to this
posting, it is possible that this allows the C400 to do 24-bit color using
the version of X that comes with RH8. Bear in mind that upgrading your
BIOS is a risky business that can, if done wrong, mess up your computer so
thoroughly that it will never work again, ever. You have been warned.
Sound: The sound configuration works out of the box. However,
RedHat 8.0 doesn't come with MP3 support, which is annoying. You can fix
this by installing mpg123 from here
and xmms MP3 support from here. I also
like Zinf, since it supports album
downloads from the excellent Emusic.com. Unfortunately the current
RPMs on the Zinf site are compiled against the wrong libraries and the
latest version of the source (2.2.2) doesn't compile on RedHat 8, so I've
put a copy of the source for the previous version (2.2.1) here.
It compiles and installs cleanly - you know the drill. You'll also need
this
library to make it work. Another useful source for RPMs of things that
are missing from RH8 is FreshRPMs'
RedHat site.
The volume buttons on the keyboard (Fn-PgUp and Fn-PgDn) don't work under
Linux by default, but it's quite easy to make them work. You download the
i8kutils package from here and install it.
Then run the command i8kbuttons -u "aumix -v +5" -d "aumix -v -5" -m
"aumix -v 0" & to start the volume daemon, and the volume buttons
and the mute button will work. I put this command in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local
file so that it runs automatically every time I boot the machine.
KDE: RedHat 8.0 annoyingly assumes you want to use Gnome. Why
do they still do this? Come on, wake up guys. Well, it's easily
fixed; just give yourself a .xinitrc file with the single line
startkde in it. Also there's this "bluecurve" thing that
everyone has been making a huge fuss over -- it makes KDE look like Gnome.
This is undesirable to people who are used to the standard KDE look and
feel. But it's easy to get rid of. It's just a theme. Pull up the theme
manager in the Control Center (under "Look and Feel") and change the theme
back to "Default" and everything will look familiar again.
Networking: Ethernet and wireless both work perfectly out of the
box. If you're going to be using wireless you need to run
redhat-config-network to set up your connection. Click on
"Add", then select "Wireless connection" and fill in the blanks and
everything should be fine. If you want to enable WEP, you'll have to go
back and edit your new device after you've created it -- for some reason
the box for the WEP key doesn't appear in the creation dialog, but does
appear in the edit dialog. Go figure.
The wireless device will appear as eth1, and you can switch between
Ethernet and wireless with ifup and ifdown in the usual way. One point
worth mentioning: there are various pages out there telling you to fiddle
with the wireless config files and modules and stuff. I wasted days doing
this, and it's all unnecessary with this version of RedHat. Just go
through the network configuration dialog as above and everything works
nicely. Also, some folks will tell you you ought to use the new orinoco_cs
driver, rather than the wvlan_cs driver that gets used by default. Do not
do this. The orinoco_cs driver has problems with WEP. If I enable WEP
with the orinoco_cs driver, my connection hangs after about 5 minutes. The
wvlan_cs driver, although it is indeed older, does not have this problem,
which may be why RedHat opted to stick with it. (This problem is also
discussed here, where
the author suggests a different solution, using the linux-wlan drivers.)
CD-ROM: The CD drive works fine out of the box -- it appears as
/dev/hdc -- but for some reason known only to them, RedHat decided to
disable DMA on the CD in this release. In previous versions of RedHat
Linux you could just type hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc and DMA would
turn on. Now if you try that you get a message saying it's not permitted.
The fix is to put the line options ide-cd dma=1 in your
/etc/modules.conf file. After a reboot you'll have DMA by default and
everything will be cool.
Suspend: Suspend is flaky. The machine will suspend to disk OK
provided you set up the appropriate disk partition, as described above, but
it hangs on suspend-to-RAM, unless you've done a previous suspend-to-disk.
This is the only thing that is still bugging me. Apparently this is a new
problem that appeared with RedHat 8.0. See the many messages on this topic
posted on this useful
message board. The current workaround is just to do a suspend-to-disk
before you do a suspend-to-RAM. (To suspend to disk you press Fn-A.)
There doesn't seem to be much help for this. It's a known bug in RedHat 8
(it wasn't there in 7.3); it will probably be fixed someday. Bummer. Also
there seems to be a problem in the BIOS so that when you come back from
suspend-to-RAM the BIOS thinks the machine is really hot and turns the fan
on full blast and won't turn it off. If it does this the fix is to type
Fn-Z, which makes the BIOS reload its settings and then it will turn the
fan off.
That's about it. Overall, I definitely recommend this machine. If you
want a small-but-powerful laptop with every feature imaginable that runs
Linux cleanly, I think it's down to this machine or the Toshiba Portege
2000. (I chose the Dell because it has twice the disk space, twice the CPU
speed, and twice the battery life, all of which are important to me. The
Tosh however is lighter and thinner and sure looks cool. A friend of mine
has one, and I have to admit it's pretty nice. She has a page about her
experiences running Gentoo on it here.) You might
also want to look at the Compaq N410c. This is a very nice looking
machine, but I didn't get it because previous Compaq machines were rumored
to have some issues with Linux.