Setting up a linux laptop

This is the story of how I set up a new laptop PC to run Linux as a service to the department.

Description

The laptop was purchased from Carrera as a: Carrera Epsilon L7300 Notebook What arrived was an ASUS L7000B notebook PC to the specification quoted by Carrera:

Intel 440BX chipset
Pentium II 400MHz mobile processor
64Mb SDRAM
SMI 710 video adapter with 4 Mb RAM
13.3" TFT LCD Display, 1024x768, 64k colours
4.3Gb 2.5" IDE hard disk
Built-in ATAPI CD-ROM
D-Link DE-660 PCMCIA ethernet adaptor

What I did with it

I installed Redhat 6.1 off the CD-ROM. This failed when I tried to install in graphical mode, but worked fine when I used the text mode install. I used the standard setup boot disk (boot.img) rather than the PCMCIA boot disk. I chose custom install and set it to install everything into a 2.4Gb partition. I opted for 128Mb swap partition, and the remains of the hard disk were left to windows98.

The installation occupied 1,338,756 out of 2,477,880 1k blocks.

Initially, neither networking or X worked. Perhaps unsurprisingly: since I hadn't used the PCMCIA boot floppy, the setup process was unable to detect and setup my ethernet adaptor, and I had installed the 16-colour VGA X-server XFree86-VGA16-3.3.5-3 which comes with Redhat 6.1.

I copied a few of our standard configurations into /etc to conform with our standard security and logging configurations, then set up the links in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d and /etc/rc.d/rc5.d:

   S05pcmcia   S13ypbind  S30syslog  S50inet  S72autofs    S90xfs
   S10network  S15netfs   S40atd     S60lpd   S75keytable  S99local
   S11portmap  S20random  S40crond   S60nfs   S85gpm

Networking

The important point here is that the D-Link ethernaet adaptor is NE2000 compatible (kernel module ne).

I created the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

   DEVICE=eth0
   IPADDR=128.40.173.150
   NETMASK=255.255.0.0
   NETWORK=128.40.0.0
   BROADCAST=128.40.255.255
   ONBOOT=yes

I created the file /etc/conf.modules:

   alias eth0 ne

I edited the file /etc/sysconfig/network to be:

   NETWORKING=yes
   FORWARD_IPV4=false
   HOSTNAME=present
   DOMAINNAME=biochem.ucl.ac.uk
   GATEWAY=128.40.173.245
   GATEWAYDEV=eth0
   NISDOMAIN=ourdomain

When I rebooted, the network came up.

The X server

I did a search for "asus linux XFree86 SM710" on Deja-News and found a suggestion from jos@xos.nl that support for the SM710 and SM910 might be found in a newer release of XFree86 (XFree86-3.3.6-11).

I tried simply installing XFree86-SVGA-3.3.6-11.i386.rpm without upgrading any of the other packeges that make up XFree86. I could now get X to start, but at an appallingly low resolution - about 320x240 I reckon.

Looking in /etc/X11/XF86Config, I saw:

    Identifier  "LCD Panel 1024x768"
    VendorName  "Unknown"
    ModelName   "Unknown"
    HorizSync   31.5-48.5
    VertRefresh 60

followed by all the usual modelines.