The most difficult was a Macintosh iBook 1st generation that i managed to install Mandrake 8.0 PPC it doesn't looked too good in the end because I just managed to make Xwindows to show 256 colours at 800x600 that's because the only Xserver starting was a modified one that was a little old, if I had more time I would have installed Debian and probably i could have 800x600 at 16 bit colour, everything else worked fine, the boot loader is yaboot, you have to press 'c' to boot from the cdrom and the network adapter was properly detected.
Other laptop that i installed linux was a Airis, it's a laptop made in Spain with a SIS630 chipset,it's really cheap here in Portugal so i have seen quite a few a already. Everything worked fine except the resolution in Xwindows the SIS630 has vga onboard and the driver that comes in Xfree 4.1 doesn't work so you most use Fbdev and set lilo.conf to vga=792 in the meanwhile i read in a mailing list that sis or something released a working driver.
NEWS 22-03-2002. I have installed in a Airis with the sis630 chipset the Mandrake 8.2 and Xfree 4.2.0 and itworked at 1024x768@16b. Also the sound worked loud and clear.
I also installed a Dell Inspiron 4000, a great laptop with a working apm,network and sound, by the way this laptop was kind of smuggled to Portugal because Dell only sell Latitude in Portugal so my friend bougth it from Spain Dell website and then asked a friend to sent it to Portugal,hehe. the downside is the spanish keyboard and that in linux it's not possible to see the lcd and the vga at the same moment.
I have sucessefuly installed Debian Woody in a Toshiba Libretto 70 CT. The pc is dual booting Win98 and Linux. Because it has only a PCMCIA floppy drive and installed Debian from HD using one Woody CD i copied to the FAT partition.
First day 17/12/2001 :)
I just installed Linux in my brand new Asus B1.
Video: Xfree 4.1 at 1024x768
sidenote: the brochure that i have talks about SXGA+ 1400x1050 but i think that's not right,
i just know of Asus Italia that has the same info, all the other Asus sites have only XGA 1024x768 in the specs of this laptop
Sound: working great!! with hardware controlled volume and software controlled mixer working.
Quite good although you shouldn't expect a great bass but for the size is quite enjoyable.
Great portuguese keyboard with a stupid little fingerprint reader :)
Mem: 512 Mb PC100 SDRAM
Harddrive: 30 Gb IBM udma5 22 MB/s
Screen: 15 " LCD :) the best i ever seen In My Humble Opinion
It's a bit on the heavy side 3,3 kg :(
A modular bay that i can install the DVD,floppy or a second battery that i have.
With the second battery i can get almost 6 hours of autonomy.
I have also a wireless pcmcia card i802.11b.
Here is a screenshot click the thumbnail
and a snapshot
I currently have Mandrake Linux 8.1 and Debian Woody 3.0 running fine. I first installed a stupid OS called MS xp that i needed and then the Mandrake 8.1 3 CDs distro, i used lilo to dual boot the two, then i installed Debian with the 2 floppy disks rescue and root from the debian woody then i downloaded from the web just the packages i wanted at an amazing 200 kBytes/s given by my university connection, dont try this at home :) Portugal doesn't have flat rate like some other countries and ADSL and Cable are just starting to show up :(
I just tested the vga out and the tv out and it worked well.
PCMCIA works OK.
I still haven't tested :
Firewire
Irda
Although I've tried running LIRC but it uses SIR to talk to remote controlers that use CIR. Unfortunely the VIA Infrared in BIOS just gives the FIR setting, so LIRC didn't work although i connected to a SIR only device a Toshiba Libretto 70CT and i was able to transfer little files(<100 KB)
I never used the modem because I just have ISDN but Serguei Chabanov wrote me saying that it works in Linux :
The driver is available from http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/pctel-linux/ You need pctel-0.8.6.tar.gz, maybe the latest version (0.9.2). 0.9.2 would not compile properly on my system (SuSE 8.0) - there were no visible errors, but it did not install the actual module pctel.o. Driver version 0.8.6 worked for me. Also, kernel sources need to be installed. I used ./configure --with-hal=pct789 Everything worked according the instructons. The modem does not make any sound, but it works well for dial-up connection.More recently in August 2002 Nabil Sefrioui told me that compiled a 2.4.19 kernel with the pctel 0.9.4 driver and it worked ok.
Finally here is my lilo.conf which i use to triple boot the system I'm using ReiserFs in the root partition of Mandrake and ext2 in Debian. Here are some files that can be of interest :
lilo.conf
lspci
lspcidrake
lsmod
XF86Config-4
dmesg
XFree86.0.log
A word about Mandrake: although i'm using Mandrake 8.1 i'm not using the kernel 2.4.8-24
Because of some kernel flaws i upgraded to 2.4.8-34 and then recompiled from the kernel source packages because of the kapm-idled that is always running in the background of Mandrake default setup. Also the ACPI power management is not enabled in the kernel. So what i did was recompile the kernel to disable apm and enable acpi and everything is now running fine.
31-1-2002 I finished downloading Mandrake 8.2beta1 2 Cds and tried to install.it worked ok! There are some major new things and i'm quite impressed that i can from the install say that i want a encrypted filesystem although i haven't tested yet(i will do it in a old pentium desktop lying around in home), there's Xfree 4.2.0 that is incorrectly installed. Beware that Mandrake install automatically in setup the FBDev driver and that doesn't work! after the install insert the first CD and then go to the Mandrake/RPMS and do urpmi Xfree-server-4.2.0-mdk.rpm then go to /rtc/X11 do rm X and do ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 X then startx works alright.
Supermount is working again, you don't need to mount the cdrom or floppy just cd to /mnt/cdrom and the process is automatic.
Also i noticed that the kernel 2.4.17 isn't running kapm-idled although isn't running acpi either but this is a good thing so it didn't make have to compile the kernel.
March 2002
Sucessfuly installed Suse 7.3 in my laptop and although my preference still goes towards Mandrake i was impressed by the easy instalation that suse was.
In the meanwhile a friend of mine bringed a old TI Extensa 670 laptop to install Linux, with only 16 Mb Ram a Pentium 120 and a litle 11" DSTN screen, but on the good side it brings a CD, a Pcmcia and a touchpad that worked, i was suprised to see a touchpad in a laptop this old when just recently toshiba changed its policy and started to sell their laptops with this pointing device. After having problems installing mandrake not because the software but because the cdrom didn't liked cdrw i tried o install debian using the network, but the pcmcia car was a rtl8139 that when introduced in the pcmcia socket just produced the low tone that means that it wasn't detected, so in this case the solution was to use a recent snapshot from the Debian woody that i borrowed from my friend Tiago Candeias and the instalation was a breeze. Special Note to the XF86 configuration use the 800x600 at 8 bits and the driver "chips".
Bought a wireless lan. Check wlan page.
April 2002
ACPI Info
Excerpt from a reply to a question about acpi working in the Asus B1 laptop.
I have bad news for you the acpi is not working in my laptop but i really didn't tried it hard.
Maybe because i have two batteries [:)] at the same time and most of my work is in home and in university where
i always have ac power.
But it isn't just a linux problem, in windows xp i have most of acpi funcionality, battery level
and resume but sometimes when the resume starts and the laptop awake the mouse doesn't respond and i have to
turn off using the power button and say byebye to whathever application that was running.
Has you have seen in my page i installed quite a few laptops and i have the idea that apm was wonderful.
It worked ok in Linux until Microsoft and Intel pushed the acpi tecnology [:(]
Why i haven't tried to test acpi?
Because i have to recompile the kernel, currently i have Debian woody that doesnt have acpi and Mandrake
8.2 that also doesn't bring acpi by default in the kernel, i suppose to prevent incompatibilities with
generic hardware.
In Mandrake 8.1 i have compiled my own kernel and enabled acpi but the acpi package i use doesn't work
saying it has the wrong kernel version but i didn't bother with that.
you can see the tree from /proc/acpi
[a11776@asusb1 acpi]$ tree
.
|-- ac_adapter
| `-- 0
| `-- status
|-- battery
| |-- 1
| | |-- info
| | `-- status
| `-- 2
| |-- info
| `-- status
|-- button
| |-- lid
| |-- power
| `-- sleep
|-- dsdt
|-- event
|-- info
|-- processor
| `-- 0
| |-- info
| `-- status
`-- thermal
`-- 0
|-- info
`-- status
13 directories, 12 files
[a11776@asusb1 acpi]$ cat thermal/0/status
Temperature: 3262 (1/10th degrees Kelvin)
State: ok
Cooling Mode: active (noisy)
Polling Frequency: n/a
[a11776@asusb1 acpi]$ cat battery/1/info
Present: yes
Design Capacity: 58320 mWh
Last Full Capacity: 60436 mWh
Battery Technology: secondary (rechargeable)
Design Voltage: 10800 mV
Design Capacity Warning: 6043 mWh
Design Capacity Low: 3021 mWh
Capacity Granularity 1: 12 mWh
Capacity Granularity 2: 12 mWh
Model Number: B1A
Serial Number:
Battery Type: Li-ION
OEM Info: ASUSTek
Now you can see that acpi respond if i run a application that puts the cpu at 100%
[a11776@asusb1 acpi]$ cat battery/1/status
Present: yes
State: discharging
Present Rate: 0 mW
Remaining Capacity: 60436 mWh
Battery Voltage: 12500 mV
[a11776@asusb1 acpi]$ cat battery/1/status
Present: yes
State: discharging
Present Rate: 16476 mW
Remaining Capacity: 60436 mWh
Battery Voltage: 12305 mV
Conclusion,
I don't know if buying the Asus B1 is the best solution for you in respect to the acpi
i know that i'm quite happy with it, i could have buyed a compaq presario 700 but a friend of mine
has quite a few problems with it starting with no sound and a few bios problems.
On the other hand i'm seeing here in Portugal a laptop with Pentium IV 2Ghz and ATI Radeon 7500 and 15" tft at 2000 EUR
when i bougth in November 2001 the Asus B1 at 2500 EUR. That's normal and i know that my laptop soon will become obsolete
but in the meanwhile it is just what i needed.
5-6-2002 BIOS PROBLEMS SOLVED !!
I sent this latter to Asus technical support at holland and usa:
I'm a happy Asus B1000 Notebook user until i had this problem. I made a bios update and everything seemed ok until i pressed the "tilde" key and the "less than" key because now they don't respond. I have a Portuguese keyboard and the tilde key is located just left the enter key and just on top of left shift and the less than key is just at right of the left shift key and on top of the left control key. The bios revision that came with the notebook was 203 and I flashed using winflash to the 207 version.Then I rebooted and the first thin i did was enter the bios using f2 and saved and exit and then when i booted into windows xp i noticed that everything was ok but the two dead keys. Also i noticed a different behaviour from the fan, now it's more responsive to temperature, it goes to full speed faster than before. Because I'm Portuguese is essencial to me the tilde key and because i use a dual boot setup to Linux the less than is essencial to redirect the output from a command. I'm a big fan of Linux and because of that if you do a query in Google about "ASUS B1" the first link that come up is to my page because I explain how to use linux in the asus b1 laptop. I plugged in a keyboard to the ps/2 port and I was able to see the tilde and the less than key generated from that keyboard I made the innocent mistake of using winflash because it didn't gives the option of backing up the bios to a file. When i made a DOS boot floppy i then noticed that the aflash has that feature and I'm thinking that maybe I can ask to someone about doing a bios backup and send me the file because I'm convinced that this problem is related to the bios version. I searched the asus ftp site in ftp.asus.com and it was the only site I could download versions 200,201,202a,203a,204a, 206a,207a the other two asuscom.de and asus.com.tw just have the latest version. I flashed version 203,206,207 and the keys still didn't respond. Is the bios generic or is keyboard related in any way? Has somebody mentioned this problem before? Thanks for any effort to help me. Ruben Oliveira email : rsolivei(at) ualg (dot) pt http://w3.ualg.pt/~rsolivei/asusb1.html You can see a picture from the keyboard with two yellow dots to see where the two keys are located below.
after that I got a response from USA with the most recent version from bios that is also available at the ftp so it didn't help me, then another asus B1 owner Serguei sent me an email saying that the same happened to him and he fixed the problem using some files the local shop gived him after a complaint, unfortunely he didn't had the files but finally some hope to this problem. Finally Asus Holland sent me the files needed to flash again the asus after the 207a flash version to enable the two keys. Everything is now OK. :) If anyone needs these files I could send them but I recommend you to use the Holland Asus techical support. Many thanks to Johan Kreeft from asustek.nl.
17-08-2002
Due to some request here is the file that was sent to me.
read the instruction how to use it in the readme inside the zip.
b1keyboardfix.zip I suppose that this is specific to some keyboard so I recommend that you use the Asus Technical Support, they were very quick responding to my problem.
And please read the next email i received before flashing anything.
09-08-2002
I received a nice email from Werner van Niekerk that works in a Asus Distributor in UK giving this info :
I would just like to clarify a point or two regarding the Asus B1 laptop First revision: xga second revision: sxga no difference in motherboard or anything, so LCD's can be swopped around easily Secondly, regarding your keyboard problem. The system utilises two areas within the bios chip, one for system bios, one for keyboard bios. If the keyboard bios version doesnt match the keyboard used you will get this problem of some keys not functioning. Plugging in an external keyboard will resolve the issue, as an external keyboard contains it's own controller chip, disabling the onbaord keyboard bios and keyboard controller. As far as I know, there are different versions of this keyboard bios around, hence, to offer the files Asus HOLLAND gave you to someone who may have a US keyboard layout would probably cause more harm than good, as he needs a US specific keyboard bios.8-07-2002
Nabil Sefrioui sent me an email with the confirmation that there are Asus B1 with a 1400x1050 resolution. Here is the config file also with a usb mouse ant the ps2 touchpad configured. Just if you wonder you can connect a ps2 mouse to the ps2 port and he automatically works because the touchpad works with the same protocol.
XF86Config-4 at 1400x1050. Nabil also confirmed that the Asus B1 modem works OK with 0.8.6 pctel driver but not with the latest, but in August 2002 he successefuly compiled a 2.4.19 linux kernel with the pctel 0.9.4 driver and everything worked smoothly.
Contact : rsolivei (at) ualg (dot) pt
Links
Linux Laptop Links to linux instalation experiences in laptopsMandrake User Help from the Mandrake Linux distribution including information about laptops
Debian Mailing Lists Help from the Debian GNU/Linux laptop mailing list
Drivers for Savage chips
Official Drivers for Savage chips