This is a sort of log for the laptop. There is another page that may be more useful for others, with organized sections on how I have set up each item in SuSE Linux 9.0. This page just has the specifications, a chronological log, and my general thoughts.
This laptop will be my main computer as I travel regularly between California and northern Minnesota. Intended work uses are data analysis in Matlab, word processing with AbiWord or OpenOffice.org, and a convenient way to archive work-related e-mails. Powerpoint-style presentations would also be nice - OpenOffice.org seems to do a good job, but I have not tried to make any presentations with it.
I will install Linux as the only operating system. I have not used SuSE before, but it sounds very slick and I would like to try it out. I may also decide to play with Gentoo, but I won't count on my ability to make it work.
The laptop is a PowerPro C 3:16 SUPRA from PowerNotebooks in Nevada. They have very good reviews and customer satisfaction, as well as a message board for people running Linux on their laptops. They are happy to sell machines with Windows or Linux pre-installed, including the Xi Graphics version of X-Windows. Mine will not have anything pre-installed. I may end up going with the Xi Graphics to be able to easily use external monitors and projectors, but I'll see what I can get XFree86 to do first. I am not planning on any heavy gaming and I don't need a super-fast frame rate.
The laptop was ordered on February 10, 2004. It should arrive in a week or so - I may or may not still be in town then. I intend to keep notes here about installing and using Linux on the laptop. Wireless, the mouse pad, external monitor, and graphics acceleration are all potential issues. Power management is supported to some degree - I have heard reports that suspend to disk can be made to work, but I haven't heard of anybody having any luck with suspend to RAM.
PowerPro C 3:16 Specifications from PowerNotebooks. There are some pictures, and a few other items not listed in the order confirmation below:
Here is the list of specs from my order confirmation:
Total order = $1,824.00
| January, 2004 | Researched laptops, chose PowerPro C 3:16 | |
| 02/10/2004 | Placed order, set up wire transfer for payment. Good timing - prices were reduced last night! | |
| 02/11/2004 | Receipt of wire transfer confirmed. Laptop to ship within 5 business days. PowerNotebooks generously offers to have it delivered by Monday, Feb. 16 since I will be leaving town on Tuesday. | |
| 02/16/2004 | Laptop arrived this evening! Tried to install Debian from a CD, but unfortunately it lacks a driver for my Broadcom ethernet adapter. There is no way to connect to the internet to do a full install. I will have to leave town and sort things out later. | |
| 02/?/2004 | Got a SuSE 9.0 LiveEval CD burned. It is very slick, and auto-detects just about everything. I have no internet access here, but it's still fun to play with the laptop at last. 3D acceleration works. Centrino processor speed control also works. Even throttled down, it uses quite a bit of batter power and the fan comes on regularly since everything is on CD. | |
| 02/?/2004 | Have ethernet access. I burned a SuSE install boot CD and tried to do an FTP install. Unfortunately, every time it gets to the point of evaluating package selections, the installer hangs. There is no ethernet activity, so it's not just checking the FTP archive. | |
| 02/?/2004 | Solution for installing SuSE: use the LiveEval CD version of SuSE to download the whole i386/9.0/ FTP archive to hard disk. This is about 7 gigs and takes four hours. In the morning, an install from this local copy works fine. It sometimes hangs during the boot process, about the time the CRON daemon is starting. This seems to be associated with the usb-uhci module. | |
| 02/?/2004 | Try to get wireless ethernet - doesn't want to work. I finally got it to work by switching off the "Change host name via DHCP" option in the "DNS and Host Name" section of YaST, and after re-configuring the wireless ethernet device randomly many times. Each time that I want to re-establish wireless, it takes a lot of re-doing the same steps over and over before it works. Wired connection works automatically as soon as it's plugged in. | |
| 02/?/2004 | Now at Soudan mine, trying to get wireless working. The first day I didn't get it to work at all. It eventually became clear that the SuSE firewall 2 was blocking all packets to the wireless. The YaST graphical setup tool for the firewall only allows one device at a time to be the "External interface" and one to be the "Internal interface," but editing the setup file (by hand or with YaST's "Editor for /etc/sysconfig Files") allows the wired and wireless ethernet to both be selected. In the GUI editor, Network->Firewall->SuSEfirewall2->FW_DEV_EXT should be changed to "wlan0 eth0". Now firewall protects both. Also changed driver in Network Devices->Network Card->wlan0 from hostap to orinoco_pci. Not sure if this made any difference. The hermes and orinoco modules are also loaded automagically. Now I can connect to wireless, but I still have to restart the firewall and run the DNS / host name setup again every time. I think there is some collision where both eth0 and wlan0 try to do DHCP, and eth0 wins even if not connected. | |
| 02/29/04 | Try to stop the hangs during boot by changing how usb modules are loaded. In the "Editor for /etc/sysconfig Files" of YaST, change the order of "usb" and "usb-uhci": Hardware->Hotplug->HOTPLUG_USB_HOSTCONTROLLER_LIST becomes "ehci-hcd ohci-hcd uhci-hcd uhci usb-uhci usb-ohci ehci-hcd". This seems to solve the problem! No more freezes! | |
| 03/01/04 | Tried connecting the laptop to a projector for the first time. No success with XFree86. After messing with the modes in XF86Config in every way I could think of, I found in the /var/log/XFree86.0.log the following: "Only one monitor detected." It just wasn't aware that a monitor was present, and defaulted to driving the external port in the same way as the LCD. Of course this didn't work. If the laptop is connected to an external CRT monitor, it works find. I can then disconnect the CRT and plug in the projector, without stopping X, and everything is beautiful. A web page suggests that the CVS version of XFree86, now XFree86-4.4.0 (just released), may do better. |
Features working / not working. The scale is from zero (not working at all or not expected to work) to 10 (perfectly supported).
| Category | Feature | Supported by... |
|---|---|---|
| Hmm, nothing in the table! | ||
| CPU | Speedstep | |
| 1 MB cache | ||
| Networking | 56.6k modem | |
| Ethernet | ||
| Wireless | ||
| Graphics | Basic VGA | |
| Hardware acceleration | ||
| External monitor | ||
| Audio | Basic analog output | |
| Digital output | ||
| Input |