Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 11:48:46 -0400
From: Christopher Kalos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [LIB] Re: Back, with Linux!
See below for responses:
On May 25, 2005, at 11:13 AM, T. Ribbrock wrote:
Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 09:22:00 +0200
From: "T. Ribbrock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Back, with Linux!
On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 04:04:12PM -0700, Christopher Kalos wrote:
[...]
1) Installation of Fedora Core 2
One question: Does FC2 use kernel 2.6? I'm asking 'cause under Mandrake
10.1, I can only use kernel 2.4, as the Libby's IDE chipset is not
recognized. I'm wondering whether that's a "kernel 2.6 problem" or a
"Mandrake's kernel problem"...
Yeah, 2.6.5 by default, 2.6.10 upon upgrading. The FC2 kernel is
compiled with 4K stacks support, though, which will hose you on a lot
of ndiswrapper-based drivers. The card I use thankfully gets around
that.
The principles will remain the same for most systems, but here's what
I
went through, starting with a desktop IDE adapter.
Just as an aside: I was able to install Mandrake 10.1 without having to
remove the harddrive. Mandrake's PCMCIA install floppy luckily also had
the driver for my PCMCIA SCSI-card. I was then able to install the base
system from a SCSI CD-ROM drive... :-) Might be worth a try to see
whether a USB CD-ROM or suchlike works as well.
No such luck for Debian, which was my first instinct, and Fedora no
longer provides boot floppies. Weak, I know. Also, I have no external
optical drive to test with.
* X, and how to get around it.
I went for less memory usage, you may want more speed.
For the default Neomagic chipset driver, go to this URL, it's got a
Fedora-compatible replacement for /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
http://wiki.bsdforen.de/index.php/Toshiba_Libretto_100CT
I found the most important parts of the X setup are:
1) The mode lines in the "Monitor" section:
ModeLine "800x480" 29.59 800 832 944 976 480 490 495 505
ModeLine "640x480" 24.11 640 672 760 792 480 490 495 505
2) Telling XFree86 or X.org to ignore conflicts with mode lines:
Option "overrideValidateMode"
(in the "Device" section)
3) What I'm missing in the file on that site is a virtual desktop size
of 800x600. I think it works very nicely. You can the scroll with
the
mouse.
Pretty much, yes. Drivers are also important, of course. As for the
virtual desktop, I intentionally avoided that, as it drives me insane.
If I wanted a virtual spanning desktop, I can think of a million better
ways to do it, none of which are available in X, and most of which
aren't sensible without a 3d accelerator :) Suffice it to say, GNOME's
screen real estate requirements don't mesh too well with a 480
pixel-high display, so I can see why you'd choose the virtual
resolution option.
The rest is pretty much standard.
* Not out of the woods yet, or what fits in 64MB?
[...]
1) fluxbox - Fluxbox window manager
I also had good experiences with Window Maker. A bit bigger, but still
very usable on the 1x0CT.
I loved Windowmaker, and as a fan of the OS X dock, wouldn't mind
stepping back to an even more NeXT-ish setup, but fluxbox is *fast*.
Ridiculously so, in fact.
2) dillo - Dillo web browser, often used in Linux handheld projects
Another alternative is Opera. Its speed on the Libby really surprised
me. I'm actually thinking about buying it to get rid of the
advertisement (which takes up precious screen real estate). On the
other
hand, if you are using a 800x600 virtual desktiop, you can scroll the
browser window to somewhere in the middle - that way you get the
maximum
out the actual page that is displayed, as all other elements are
off-screen (works with other browsers, too, of course).
I've been considering Opera, as Dillo is VERY rough around the edges
(no SSL support in the default RPM install,) but what I really want is
a tinier Firefox. Sadly, Skipstone won't compile without depending on
headers and libraries from an ancient version of Mozilla, and I have to
pick my battles wisely at this point. It's all about the tabs for me.
3) multi-aterm - Tab-enabled Linux terminal
Nice one - didn't know about that one...
In retrospect, I can't seem to use the chorded third button to paste
text in this, which is more than a little irritating. It might be a
timing issue with my hand, though, so I'm reluctant to blame the app.
* Trimming the fat
[...]
Disable anything you don't need for a plain laptop. This includes
nfs,
[...]
vncserver, kudzu, microcode_ctl, isdn, gpm, nfslock, and smartd.
[...]
Actually, I would never want to run without gpm... :-) gpm provides
mouse support on the console, which I deem very handy at times. I also
never boot into init 5 - takes far to long to start up and if I just
want to check some mail, the console is good enough by far (mutt is an
excellent mail program for this, though it's definitely aimed at
power-users).
For me, init 5 doesn't take all that long, though that's partially due
to my overzealous customizations. TinyX/kdrive, plus avoiding the
graphics-heavy default gdm setup for X login, plus other crammings into
the now-anemic 64MB of RAM helps a lot. I hold Linux developers
responsible for this bloat, however, as we used to be able to fit a
running system in 32 MB without too much trouble, back in the 2.0 days.
* Tiny gotchas
1) Kernel compilation. Just don't. It'll take forever.
You should, however, be able to compile the kernel on a faster machine,
then transfer the files. Fortunately, so far I never had reason to do
so.
You'd think so... The kernel, however, is huge, when you account for
modules, source, etc. While it's possible to just copy
/lib/modules/linux-[version], /boot/vmlinuz, /boot/initrd, and
/boot/System.map, I always feel as though it's not as clean as running
"make install" directly on the system, which requires over a gig of
diskspace. "make rpm," an option which may be limited to the Fedora
kernel-sourcecode RPM, misses certain details, and gave me a 700MB+ RPM
file. I was trying to get a pure Pentium-MMX optimized kernel, and
ended up with something fairly crappy, down to the inability to
recompile the ndiswrapper driver, which was kinda the whole point of
that exercise.
3) Enhanced Port Replicator. Don't disconnect power, Linux will shit
itself if the USB controller and any dock-attached PCMCIA cards
disappear. Did I ever learn this one the hard way...
Yup, that one can be annoying.
4) A Better browser:
[...]
As I mentioned already: Give Opera a try...
But... tabs! (And Skipstone looked so promising... ARGH!)
Another thing: Have a look at
http://www.buzzard.org.uk/toshiba/tuxtime.html
Neat! I'll look into that and get back to you about how it behaves
under 2.6.
CK
