These pages have my experiences with installing Linux onto this particular laptop...
Purchase Info:
Fry's on 22 jan 2001, m$ winME installed;
upgraded RAM with another 128M and bought pcCard lan.
Technical Info:
Intel Pentium 3, 700 Mhz (when using outlet power);
256 M RAM;
S3 Savage/IX w/MV video card (4 M AGP-VRAM);
TFT 13" 1024x768 monitor;
ESS MDM Modem (WinModem, i assume);
Synaptics PS/2 Touchpad Mouse;
and lots of other details about sound/usb/pcmcia...
The link above for the n5190 laptop showed me all kinds of useful stuff.
Here is a list of what I have done so far that may help someone else who is just getting started:
Page 1 (this) - details going from m$ to linux-and Xwin-3.3.6
Page 2 - details my next adventures - cdrom? network? not sure yet... (i ended up trying several linux distros and decided to come back to the first one listed here as working rh62-rt3 because i wanted to learn about kernel hacking and realtime issues rather than making my laptop play dvds right away.)
Page 3 - redetails everything that is stream-of-consciousness from above, so that someone else can at least get xwin running on RTLinux3.0
note to self - the silly angelfire editor always assumes that LT-GT is an html-tag and that DQ-SQ is the end of the string, so dont use them. parenthesis and square brackets are fine...
last updated 05 apr 2001
From m$ to linux
Altho not strictly necessary, I reinstalled everything from the initial system disks provided. In particular, the m$ disk is unnecessary since the reinstall disks put in everything. note - do not increase the hibernate partition beyond 0M (which actually creates a 16M partition)...
Defrag the HDD (mine was 10G)
Run (redhat 6 and up?) FIPS_2.0 to break the DOS partition in half. (I put 5G on Win, 4G for Linux)
ScanDisk the old C partition
Dos-Fdisk remove the new D Partition
Start the Linux Install of your choice...
Mandrake 7.0 - the fdisk program automatically assumes all new partitions are extended. i created a /boot (32M) as primary, /swap (512M), / (remaining 3G) as extended... be careful NEVER to check for pcmcia stuff
note - m70 used the xfree86-3.3.6 graphics, i wanted to get to xfree86-4.0.2 graphics assuming that my video card would finally be supported.
Redhat 7.0 - the disk-druid wouldnt recognize only extended linux partitions (hence the earlier /boot as a primary).
note - rh70 has some weird combination of xfree86-3 and -4 that i am still trying to sort out, it is painful...
RTLinux 3.0 (based upon Redhat 6.2) - i am still having trouble configuring my video. basically, text mode is fine, but i would like to have the graphics eventually.
note - so far i have not had to download anything, but doing so into the win-side and then bringing it over to linux is easier in mandrake, but just a quick fstab entry away in redhat. note, lilo defaults (i need win primary) are also easier in mandrake. the reason i wanted m70 was for the kernel-projects-for-linux book that i wanted to try the exercises...
i have now downloaded to floppy the xfree86config and s3_tarball from the 5190-site and hopefully will try them again tonight. (these never worked - the size was too small, the tar file should be 1.3M and it expands to 3.4M i think)
i have already downloaded xfree86-4.0.2 (both glibc-2.1 and 2.2 for m70 and rh70) and neither one was able to correctly recognize my video card - unfortunately, i cannot get to the newsgroups to lurk/post my questions...
ok - after searching google newsgroups, i finally found the real tar-file with the XF86_SVGA replacement for xf-336 i am currently using...
next i copied the 5190-site's XF86Config and that got me working from 640x480 to 1024x768 - i'm finally cooking...
newbie stuff 1, but... if you try [startx] and get something weird, then CTRL-ALT-BKSP breaks you out. normally i just got alot of error messages which theoretically are in a /tmp file somewhere.
newbie 2 - in rh, as root, i did [vi /etc/lilo.conf] and then editted the entry-names and changed the default to windows (and 10 secs, not 5). afterwards, you have to execute it [lilo] to install the changes.
newbie 3 - in redhat, i needed to add the msdos (vfat) disk so that i could mount it, since this was my only way to download stuff. [vi /etc/fstab] and add an entry [/dev/hda2 /mnt/win vfat defaults 0 0]. note - the hibernate partition /dev/hda1 is some weird a0-type that makes some linux installs croak. also, i needed to [mkdir /mnt/win] so that the mount point would exist. the first time, i typed [mount /mnt/win] but afterwards it loaded automatically.
newbie 4 - if i had any questions about stuff, in console mode [man (command)] always gave me the manual page for (command).
newbie 5 - don't forget to let autocomplete help you out. this is documented at the hp5190 site well.
newbie 6 - altho [find / -name (XF86Config) -print] works fine, try the [locate] command instead to save time. (this will need to be letup the first time, but is very handy/quick)
newbie 7 - try [SuperProbe] which should tell you info about your video card - mine said... S3 (chipset unknown) (Port probed); Signature data: e18c1211 (please report); Memory 8192 Kbytes; RAMDAC generic 8-bit poeudo-color DAC (with 6-bit wide lookup tables (or in 6-bit mode)). when in reality it is a 4M card, with 16 bpp i think.
