kipper
kipper (as in "Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast", from Red
Dwarf) is a pentium laptop running Red Hat Linux 5.0 (kernel 2.2.6). 40MB
ram, 1.3GB HD, 800x600 TFTP screen. The laptop is called the "iLuFa", by
Chaplet Systems. Yeah, you've never heard of it. It was a good deal, and the
folks at PromoX systems who sold it to me had already made sure that linux ran
happily on it.
I had some problems getting a laptop from a mail-order store last spring (a
word of advice: avoid Insight Electronics, don't use FedEx to ship to a
residence, and insist upon insurance) that drove me to hit the local papers
instead. PromoX is nearby and had a *lot* of linux gear in their shop. The
laptop was several hundred dollars cheaper than I could have gotten with a
name-brand, and works just fine. I did have some troubles setting it up
because nobody else on the Net had one; the closest thing I could find was the
Olivetti Echo which seems to be basically the same machine OEM'ed for them.
The laptop is fully modular, with a socketed (!) processor, standard SODIMM
memory, standard removeable 2.5" IDE HD, removeable keyboard. They threw in a
cheap sound card: it works find but in a quiet room I can hear a slight hiss
from the speakers ever since I rebuilt the kernel to activate it. Plus, the
system beep is very loud and changing the volume with xmixer doesn't seem to
affect it. The first time I noticed this was while I was listening to a CD
through headphones at work and I mistyped something in emacs; the beep was so
loud I almost fell out of my chair. (I've since discovered that the keyboard
has some function keys to reduce various volumes independently of the
sound card driver.. this helps alot).
APM works OK, I had to play some games with the DOS utilities that came with
the laptop to set up a suspend partition. I can't figure out how to put the
unit in 'standby' mode, it seems I can only pick standby or suspend, but
suspend works fine and in 30 seconds the laptop is off, ready to resume after
about 45 seconds. I do have one problem with it: if I leave the laptop idle
without a PCMCIA card in place, after maybe 20 minutes it goes into a coma. It
must be in some kind of suspend mode, but nothing will bring it out, and I end
up having to powercycle it. Very annoying. Any ideas on how to fix this are
more than welcome.
I've also got an ethernet PCMCIA card (3com 3c589) and a SCSI card that both
seem to work fine. The one serial port works fine, the other port is wired
internally to an IrDA port that I haven't built any hardware to talk to
yet.
I have X running happily on it, and I built fvwm-2.0.43 as a window manager.
For some bizarre reason RedHat comes with fvwm95 as the standard window
manager, which is just fvwm with a default configuration that makes it look
and act like Windows 95. Why anybody would want this is beyond me, especially
somebody who has just finished getting rid of Windows from their computer and
has moved up to Linux. But hey, it was easy to fix. I run X in 256 colors.. I
found that I can do 16bpp, but it gets really slow (less than half the speed,
I'm assuming that 16bpp keeps the X server from taking advantage of some
hardware acceleration that it could otherwise use). Perhaps the old version of
X that I'm using (XFree86-3.2) has something to do with it. 8bpp is generally
plenty. I've never tried using it with an external monitor, if I did it might
be nice to have more colors.
My main gripe with the unit so far is that the touchpad is a bit too
sensitive, and there seems to be no way to disable the "tap touchpad to
simulate a button click" feature. If my finger slips, the cursor leaps up and
to the right, clicking on everything along the way. And it doesn't take much
to make it think that my finger is slipping. I changed the xterm mapping to
require that I type shift-button-2 to paste text; this has saved me a lot of
trouble with random drive-by pastings causing strange commands to get thrown
into my shell.
Jan '98 Update
I'm slowly recovering from the upgrade to RedHat 5.0 . Things I've run into:
- On the iLuFa, you can use both the floppy and the CD-ROM drive at the
same time by attaching the floppy to the parallel port via a special
cable that comes with the laptop. You also have to change the port mode
in the SETUP boot-time program (which you access by hitting F2 as the
system is starting). What I learned from the very nice people at Chaplet
Systems right here in Sunnyvale is that you actually have to completely
reboot the machine for this mode-change to work.. suspending and then
restarting and entering SETUP before you finish resuming from disk isn't
enough, even though it gives you the SETUP screen and even though the
drive is recognized after you change the port mode. You end up with a lot
of disk errors that prevents you from mounting or booting the installer
floppy. I have found that changing the port mode during a suspend seems
to be a workable method of swapping the CD-ROM and floppy in the internal
bay without having to wait through a long Linux reboot. The kernel needs
to see the CD-ROM driver when it boots to believe that one exists, but
you can then suspend and swap in the floppy and resume and the floppy
seems to work fine.
- It is a challenge, with RedHat, to build your own kernel without making
RPM think that the kernel (and kernel-modules) RPMs are corrupted. You
basically want to move the official kernel and modules from the RPM
out of the way, build your own, install them, boot from them, move
yours out of the way and the official ones back, then remove the RPM
versions with 'rpm -e kernel' etc, then move yours back. This also
means that RPM won't report the kernel file as modified when you do an
'rpm --verify kernel', useful in case you do security scans with RPM.
- I left sound turned off this time.. there were some weird configuration
issues in the 2.0.33 kernel and the compile would break after an hour
of work (yes, it takes an hour to build the kernel on my machine).
- The big deal about RedHat 5.0 is that everything is glibc-2.0.5c based.
This is a major change. For the most part, all of my old libc5 programs
(glibc is installed as libc6) work just fine. There are two exceptions:
- Perl5
I'm not entirely sure why, but perl started coredumping after the
upgrade. It looks like perl was linked against the shared libdb
library, which itself requires the C library. RedHat 5.0 upgraded
libdb with a new version (with the same major version number) that
required the new libc6, so then perl required both libc5 for itself
and libc6 for the libdb it needed. I think that using both versions
of the C library at the same time drove it crazy. I rebuilt perl
and now it seems happy. I haven't tried out all of my old
extensions yet, in particular it wouldn't surprise me if Tk didn't
completely work.
- Emacs-20.2
Emacs works just fine, however, all of my menubars went from
black-on-gray to gray-on-gray and now I can't read anything. I
can't figure out why. The X server is new and I'm planning on
twiddling with it some weekend soon (I'm hoping that there is new
acceleration code to make 16bpp fast enough to use), or I might
switch over to the MetroX server you get with the Official RedHat
package.
But otherwise things are working OK. I spent some time with the PromoX folks
and the Chaplet folks while trying to get the floppy working so I could
upgrade, and it sounds like they aren't selling my particular model of laptop
anymore (sigh.. "progress"..). But if you happen to have purchased one and are
looking for info on how to get Linux running on it, feel free to drop me a
note.
July '99 Update
I haven't used kipper all that much for a while. Since I spend most of my time
at my desk at work or at my desk at home, a portable computer has just become
less important to me. Plus, now that I have the ADSL line at home, it no longer
important to download large things at work and then carry them home on the
laptop. It's faster to drive home and grab stuff from there. If I need it at
work then I can carry it in on the laptop the next morning. :-).
In addition, the laptop has started exhibiting some funny speed issues. It
spends a lot of its time pouting, running about 1/5th the normal speed.
Everything takes longer. Even some basic CPU benchmarks (a simple empty loop)
will report a clock speed of 30MHz instead of 120MHz. No idea.. I kill off all
the extra processes, make sure no cron jobs are running, I've checked for
spurious interrupts, APM power-slowdowns, network activity, the works. That's
why I say it's pouting: it wants me to buy a faster laptop.
Brian Warner <warner@lothar.com>
Last modified: Tue Jul 27 22:59:37 PDT 1999