Well, as I promised, I tried installing 9.0 beta 2 on my Sony VAIO C1XD
tonight. First the bad news; Guillaume, 9.0 beta 2 install is worse than
8.2 when booting off the Sony PCMCIA CDROM, seemingly. It comes up with
the "Press F1 for further options or enter to continue" screen, I hit F1
(because I want expert install with the necessary ide2 options for the
CDROM to be recognised), the screen redraws entirely grey, and the
system hangs. So that was a bit of a dead end.
The good news, though...I booted from the pcmcia.img boot floppy instead
and used that to install from the PCMCIA cdrom and the install went
almost flawlessly, and just a couple of hours later my system is usable
again - impressive!
Problems - a couple of minor niggles first of all, first with the
screen. Mandrake seems to be just a little step away from dealing with
the C1XD's display perfectly. It's a strange setup; a 1024x480 TFT
driven by a NeoMagic chipset. Mandrake detects and sets up the chipset
driver perfectly. It doesn't quite get the screen right, however.
Mandrake's XF86Config seems to have a correct modeline for the
Picturebook series 1024x480 screen, however DrakX doesn't allow 1024x480
as a possible resolution choice. In the end I just cheated and copied
over the fully working XF86Config I had from my SuSE install instead.
DrakX also didn't setup both the USB mouse and the internal 'nipple'
pointer correctly; only the USB mouse is installed. This kind of setup
is v. v. common on laptops and should be looked out for, it's perfectly
possible for it to work. My XF86Config is attached in case it's helpful
for getting the Picturebook screen and this type of dual mouse-device
input working.
A problem / question; at the F1 screen is it possible to use two of the
special options? What i'd like is to combine expert and vgalo; that is,
do an expert install at low resolution. Since the screen can only handle
480 pixels vertically it'd be best to do the install in 640x480 res;
it's usable at whatever res the 'expert' option uses, but only just (the
bottom of the screen is just cut off). From the instructions on the F1
screen it *seems* i'm limited to either/or, is this actually the case?
Now a kinda bigger problem; I had fun, once again, getting my wireless
LAN card working. I have an ActionTec wireless card that uses the Prism
II chipset; the orinoco_cs driver seems to be the best for this card.
However, the version Mandrake includes of this driver, wherever it came
from, seems a bit duff - I couldn't get a connection using it. In the
end I had to install the freshest version (currently 0.12b) of the
orinoco drivers from the author's homepage (
http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/ ) to get a working connection.
(This version of the driver has an updated hermes.conf, with extra card
definitions including mine which I sent over to him; unfortunately the
current release version has a typo in this so my card still isn't
recognised automatically, you have to go into hermes.conf and add a
missing quotation mark after ACTIONTEC . )
I realise wlan support in Linux is kinda messy, but wlan is very likely
to take off in a big way in the consumer market soon, and it'd be great
if Mandrake really pulled it together and supported a large range of
wireless cards flawlessly out of the box. At the moment wlan under Linux
is very much "read lots of stuff and hack it together yourself"
territory. Time for another draksomething? :)
I notice beta 2 managed to ship with the broken version of harddrake2
(the failing on boot was fixed recently but the version in beta 2 still
fails on boot), i presume this is why it's disabled by default at the
'select services that run on boot' section of the install?
Oh, P.S., whoever patched the GTK1 file selection dialog to not delete
the current filename when you change directory should be awarded the
highest honours available to mankind. Whoever you are...I LOVE YOU.
--
adamw
# /.../
# SaX generated XFree86 config file
# Created on: 2002-05-02.
#
# Version: 4.3
# Contact: Marcus Schaefer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 2001
#
# Automatically generated by [SaX2] (4.3)
# PLEASE DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE!
#
Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/PEX"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/misc:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/75dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/100dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin7/75dpi:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/baek
