As a note, I now use a Sony Vaio Z505S notebook, running Linux of course, and it's quite nice. I do miss the 810's spread keyboard, though.
Pay special attention to sections marked with this sign; they discuss
potential sources of trouble.
My thanks to others with similar pages on the Linux Laptop Homepage. It is largely because of the information in those pages that I was able to make my notebook a working Linux machine without too many headaches. With luck, this page will reduce headaches for someone else.
Each Linux distribution (Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, etc.) has its own installation procedure, so follow the directions with your distribution. The following notes may helpful in going through your installation steps. It is extremely helpful to have a distribution on a bootable CD-ROM (e.g., Red Hat 4.2 or 5.0). An installation involving booting from a floppy and then switching to CD-ROM is quite tricky, since the SENS 810 must be powered off before swapping the two devices. I won't even try to describe the process here.
Use the ide0=serialize command line flag when executing the
Linux kernel! See the section on LILO below for
making this automatic. Although I have seen no other mention of problems
with the Intel 82371 IDE accelerator, I have experienced unpleasant,
filesystem-damaging IDE problems when both my hard disk and CD-ROM are in
use. Similar problems have been noted for the CMD Technologies 0640 and
Intel RZ1000 IDE chips, and the "serialize" solution used for those chips
appears to also solve the problems on my machine.
Note that you should run a Linux version 2 or later kernel. The ide0=serialize option is known to not work properly for the SENS 810 with kernels as late as 1.3.xx. (Thanks to Alexandre Petit-Bianco)
If you used FIPS in order to keep Windows 95 intact, make sure you don't
change the size or location of the /dev/hda1 partition, i.e., the one
containing Windows, when installing Linux.
There is a 43 MB partition at the end of the hard disk delivered
on a new SENS 810. This partition is reserved for use by
the Phoenix BIOS suspend-to-disk function, so you probably want to leave it
alone. The suspend-to-disk works nicely under Linux; just use the
<Fn>F8 key combination.
Make sure you install the SVGA X server (XF86_SVGA) when installing XFree86.
The SENS 810 has a Cirrus Logic CL-GD7548 graphics chip. While this chip is not listed among those supported by the SVGA server prior to XFree86 version 3.3, it can be treated as a CL-GD5428, which is supported by older servers. Regardless of the server version, I would suggest getting a copy of my /etc/X11/XF86Config. It sets some options that cannot be set through the xf86config program. Specifically, it enables linear addressing, which allows support of 16 bits/pixel color, and it disables hardware bit-blitting, which causes glitches.
SENS 520 note: I have heard from some owners of the Samsung SENS 520 that the above XF86Config works for those machines also. You probably want to change the DotClock setting in the file from 50 to 35, though. (Thanks to Larry Creech for the dot clock info)
The touchpad has a PS/2 interface. If you cannot move the cursor with the
touchpad when you run X, then likely either 1) your kernel does not have PS/2
mouse support enabled and you need to build a new kernel, or 2) you are
missing the /dev/psaux device node on your system. It is also good
to have a /dev/mouse node linked to the touchpad input. The commands
to make the necessary device node and the link are:
bash# mknod /dev/psaux c 10 1
Note that each of these commands can only be executed by the super-user.
bash# ln -s /dev/psaux /dev/mouse
Because of all the multimedia extras on the SENS 810, you'll need to adjust
the port addresses and IRQs from those that are allowed in the default
PCMCIA configuration. Here's my
config.opts file with the necessary changes.
You will also need to set the PCMCIA interface controller options correctly
for the SENS 810. The necessary options are PCIC_OPTS="poll_interval=100
fast_pci=y", and are set either in the file /etc/pcmcia.conf or
/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia, depending on how your flavor of Linux installs
PCMCIA card services. Note that newer kernels (2.2.x) require
fast_pci=1 rather than fast_pci=y. (Thanks to Kurt
Konolige and Barnaby DiAnni
)
Putting the SENS into high-speed mode (FN-SPEED) during boot makes the
PCMCIA card manager mis-recognize Ethernet cards (and maybe others). There
may be option settings that will work, but I don't know them. (BTW, this
also happens under Windows 95). Once you've booted, it's OK to set your
speed high. (Thanks to Kurt Konolige)
hits since 3 April 1998