Antlinux

16Nov2001 - Another note from Andrew Wai <andrew {at} wild.com.hk>: As far as I know DRI on some PCI based ati chipsets are supported so agpgart is not actually necessary for DRI support. The r128.o module can load without agpgart.o on my laptop but is not used, even when trying to load dri support in XF86Config, ie glxinfo reports 'direct rendering: no'.

15Nov2001 - I've been working unsuccesfully to get AGP working with this laptop. I've said in the past that this laptop uses the Rage 128 video chipset from ATI, but myself and Andrew Wai <andrew {at} wild.com.hk> have both been unsuccessful in getting the agpgart.o module to load, which is what you need loaded before you try to load the r128.o module for the video card. Other than that, everything is running fine with the new install. All the packages are up to date, which is real nice.

28Oct2001 - Moved everything over to my DSL line, so this site may be down for a few days while DNS propagates. :/

24Oct2001 #2 - Forgot a file. Here's my /etc/modules file. This file is what Debian uses to load the modules for the system when you boot it. Compare it to the output of lsmod, and you'll notice that there's more modules loaded than what I ask for in /etc/modules.  Reason being, is that I only ask for the final module of a set of modules, and the kernel automagically figures out what modules the requested module depends on, then loads the dependent modules prior to the one I request. Works great, and if I'm testing out things like ALSA, all I have to do is modprobe the snd-card-intel8x0 module, and the rest of the modules it needs gets loaded automatically. After you build a new kernel, or build ALSA, you'll need to reboot for this to work, because the kernel builds a list of dependencies at boot time.

24Oct2001 - We have Wood! Woody is running very nicely on my 30G drive. Cool thing about Woody is that most every package is only like one or two minor versions down, for example, libsdl is 1.2.0 in Woody, and the most current release is 1.2.2. Migration was pretty easy from the old drive, however, I could not mount the Reiserfs partitions from the old drive. I had to put the old drive back in, and then move the files to the ext2 partitions on the new drive with an external PCMCIA IDE adapter. Here's my fstab and lsmod. My drive is partitioned with a single 8G partition for Windows 2000, and 8G total for Debian Woody. The rest (for right now) is unpartitioned. Fujitsu has released a
full set of Windows 2000 drivers, even the scroll button works in Windows 2000 now. You'll have to come up with your own copy of WinDVD however. I'm running the default kernel version that came with Woody (2.2.19), because I want to use VMware for another project I'm working on. Here's my 2.2.19 kernel .config file. Woody comes with recent ALSA (v0.9.0) drivers, but I could not get those to work using the Debian source package, so I went back to the 0.5.10 drivers, and they're working fine. I've also got tarballs with WindowMaker and xmms themes on my server at home, which really helped me move over:

• Window Maker theme tarball (7.9M)
• xmms skins tarball (999k)

Please be nice to my bandwidth :)

Note that there is a bug with the Woody X 4.1 package, X won't start correctly if run with [g|x]dm, there's a new Debian X package out that fixes it, do an apt-get update;apt-get upgrade to download it. You can read more about the package bug on this Debian Weekly News page.

19Oct2001 - Just bought a 30G drive, it's an IBM IC25N030ATDA04-0, or a Travelstar 30GN 4200RPM Ultra-ATA hard drive, in English terms. The drive replaces the Fujitsu drive that came with the laptop with no problems.  The machine booted right up with the new drive. You could use a 12.5mm drive, by taking out the rubber pieces at the bottom of the drive bay, that way you could use the Fujitsu 30G drive, but I chose to go with a 9mm drive just like what came with the laptop. I've already got Windows installed in it's own 8G partition, and now I'm giving Linux it's own 8G's of space to play with. It's Debian Woody time. I mean, how many other distributions say that they've got wood? I'll post specifics of the setup at a later date.

12Oct2001 - Kernel 2.4.12: here's the kernel config file, and the lsmod without the cpqpjb.o module, I've not gotten around to recompiling it for 2.4.12 yet. Remember, if you are using ALSA, you'll need to re-install the alsa-driver package again so all the modules get put into the new modules directory for the new kernel. Use modprobe snd-card-intel8x0; modprobe snd-pcm-oss to install the freshly compiled modules into the system, no reboot required :).

I've just figured out in the last few days that the ATI Rage 3D Mobility video chipset is basically the same thing as a Rage 128, so there's a lot of extra things in my kernel now. If you want to get a good look at the differences between 2 kernel config files, you can use this:

diff -u original_file new_file | vim -

This will open the output of diff in vim, if you have vim set up correctly, it will do syntax highlighting, and you'll easily be able to tell what's changed.

The framebuffer is for the Rage 128, and I also turned on DRI for X 4.x for the Rage 128 video card as well.  The end goal of all this video stuff is to be able to run the MesaGL version of prBoom, a version of the original Doom game engine that was GPL'ed by id Software.

11Sep2001 - A very big (and not so great) day.

13Aug2001 - Flashed my SMC Wireless Barricade last night with the 1.93e flash image, and now the Lucent Orinoco Gold card works in Linux!! Very cool. Now the only excuse I have to be in Windows is to watch DVD's ;) This imwheel stuff is great, I'm still tweaking things, but it's a huge improvement in usability in the system as a whole to be able to scroll up and down inside of applications when I want to using the mouse wheel. Highly recommended to set this up. Oooo! I also compiled kernel 2.4.8 last night, here's my config. Remember when you compile you'll need to add the ALSA sound modules, plus for me I had to recompile the cpqpjb.o module.

As an aside, in order to fit 33 Gigabytes of MP3's onto the Personal Jukebox PJB-100 MP3 player I mentioned on the 10th, I'm reencoding most of my MP3 collection to 128kb/sec, as 99% of them are encoded @ 256kb/sec bitrate. I'll be able to fit them all onto the PJB-100 that way. That's going to be fun as hell, carry my entire CD collection with me.  Here's the script that I'm using with LAME to reencode.

12Aug2001 - Playing with imwheel 0.99. So far, I've gotten Mozilla to scroll up and down, xmms and wmix to go up/down in volume, and BitchX to page up/down all with the mousewheel on my Logitech Optical mouse. Here's my imwheelrc and imwheel startup.conf (it should be called startup.conf). I put both files into /etc/X11/imwheel/, and symlinked /etc/imwheelrc to imwheelrc in the former directory; you might create a ~/.imwheelrc symlink and point it back to the system imwheelrc file to keep imwheel from bitching. I also had to monkey with my XF86Config-4 file, so pick up another copy if you are using mine. I'm overriding Mozilla's mouse wheel support with that provided by imwheel, it scrolls a little smoother IMO; the imwheelrc has the dirty details. imwheelrc is subject to change, so check back often.  I've also installed the aumix package, and I've got a startup script that uses it to set the voulme at boot time to 80% for the Master, PCM and CD volume levels. Aumix works on ALSA because I have the ALSA OSS modules loaded.

10Aug2001 - lsmod from 2.4.7 kernel with the Lucent Wavelan, and my new toy - a Personal Jukebox PJB-100 MP3 player. The PJB-100 has it's own module to let you use it with USB, called cpqpjb.o. Here's a screenshot of me viewing the files on my PJB-100 while running Linux :). Just like I did with my USB scanner, I've not even installed the Windows drivers for the PJB yet! At this very moment, I'm at work, copying MP3's using NFS over the wireless network from a box in a lab to my PJB over a USB connection to my Fujitsu. Buzzword bingo, I love it! Only problem is, at 802.11b speed, it's going to take forever to transfer 20G of MP3's.

Good Links (Also on the Links page):

• Here's the page with details on how to connect your PJB-100 in Linux; this guy, Max Berger, also has the hacked up cpqpjb.o that I mention above, aparently Compaq's cpqpjb.o won't run on a 2.4 kernel. His module compiles and runs fine. It's about mid-way down that page, "Kernel Module for 2.4.0-test6" is where you'll find it
• Compaq's PJB project website, and here's Linux PJB downloadables
• The application I'm using to upload MP3's is called pjbmanager by Alexander Mosley, get it here or here
• I just found an Sourceforge project called OpenPJB

The first link above has instructions on how to set things up. I changed things a bit as far as the name of the cpqpjb device name, I have /dev/usb/cpqpjb instead of /dev/cpqpjb, which breaks the Compaq API, they have the path hardcoded as /dev/cpqpjb. I did this because my Kodak DC280 device ( /dev/usb/camera ) also lives in that directory. pjbmanager has a copy of the Compaq API (it's GPL'ed), so if you want to change either the Compaq API or the pjbmanager copy of the API to point the cpqpjb device to something other than /dev/cpqpjb, the file you want is pjbapi/pjbdev_linux.c.Do a text search for the string 'cpqpjb', then change the device it uses; there's two references in that file, change them both, then compile/recompile. I moved the module by hand from the source tree to /lib/modules/2.4.7/misc, and copied the pjbmanager binary to /usr/local/bin, I didn't run 'make install'. I'm still working on getting my Lucent to talk to my SMC Barricade wireless gateway, with no luck. I think I'm going to get Lucent's source (wavelan2 driver) and toy around with that, see if it works. I think I'm running the latest and greatest Mozilla as well, if I'm not, I'm sure I will be soon :)

Extra files added to my CVS tree:

• /etc/init.d/networking - This is what brings your network up at boot time. If I have $PCMCIA=no in my boot environment (it's set in lilo.conf with an append="PCMCIA=no"), then the internal network card is used, otherwise ($PCMCIA=yes)only the loopback adapter is brought up at boot time
• /etc/manpath.config - I'm adding a lot of apps (PostgreSQL for one) that have their own sets of manpages, and this is my current manpath.config with all of my extra manpages from all over the filesystem.
• /etc/lilo.conf - Give you a good example of what you can do with schemes and setup and whatnot. Hardest part for me is remembering what config does what, that's what the boot message is for (the 'message=' line in lilo.conf)

31Jul2001 - Kernel 2.4.7. w00t! I just thought about this a few days ago talking to Tom Greene, another S-4546 owner, that I should be posting my kernel .config files, so that people can use them as a base when they are compiling new kernels for this model laptop. So here's my .config file for kernel 2.4.7, enjoy. I had to recompile the alsa-driver tarball to work with the new kernel, make sure you delete config.cache before running the ./configure line listed on July 20th. I also got the ornioco_cs driver to work, the trick for that was to change the /etc/pcmcia/config file so that orinoco_cs is loaded instead of wvlan_cs for any card that PCMCIA identifies as "Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter". The way /etc/pcmcia/config is set up, each card is identified by the ident string, then a device is bound to that ident string. That device will have the actual drivers needed to run that card. Like so:

card "Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter"
version "Lucent Technologies", "WaveLAN/IEEE"
#bind "wvlan_cs"
bind "orinoco_cs"
device "orinoco_cs"
class "network" module
"kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_cs"


Devices are listed in the 1st half of /etc/pcmcia/config, and cards are in the 2nd half.  So the "Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter" card will have "orinoco_cs" bound to it, and "orinoco_cs" in turn will load the file
(/lib/modules/$KERNEL_VERSION/)"kernel/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_cs" when the card is inserted; now orinoco_cs.o is dependent on hermes.o and orinoco.o, but that's what modprobe is for, it figures all of this stuff out for us and loads the dependent modules automatically. Nice. So here is my /etc/pcmcia/config file as well, you can either use it as it is, or diff it against your existing one if you've modified it already. I'll post a 2.4.7 lsmod file when I have the Lucent card in, so you can see what modules are loaded where and in what order.

21Jul2001 - I forgot to mention, xosl (bootloader) munges LILO in some way so that when I try to type in a config that I want to boot when LILO comes up, the keyboard is dead, and LILO boots the default. Obviously I went back to LILO as my bootloader for now, that kinda bums me out though.

20Jul2001- Kingston cross-shipped a 256M chip, so I'm back up to 256M of RAM again.  I still can't connect with my Lucent Orinoco Gold card to my SMC wireless Barricade using the 2.4.x kernel driver orinoco_cs.o. My OpenBSD laptop works fine with the SMC, so I have to wag my finger at the linux drivers as being the problem. The card in this computer works in Windows, and works in Linux with a Lucent access point router at work. I'm also tried to compile the latest ALSA 0.9.0-beta6 drivers, but no dice. The problem was with getting alsa-libs to compile, so I went back to alsa-0.5.10. Here's my ./configure line:

./configure --with-isapnp=no --with-sequencer=yes --with-oss=yes
--with-cards=intel8x0

Here's my 2.4.6 lsmod in Debian, and my /etc/modules file. When you install ALSA, you will need to add the users that you want to use the mixer and CD-ROM to your /etc/group file;  I had to add myself to both the audio and disk groups, then log out and back in to make wmix and gcd work correctly.  XMMS works again too, but I only have CD's with me right now.  I also see xosd working again, but I don't remember compiling it. Jeez, big brain fart.

10Jul2001 - The next day after I got my laptop back, it won't boot.  Now Fujitsu replaced a whole bunch of parts, so I start to thinking, what else could be wrong. Hmm, did they use my Kingston 256M DIMM, or did they put a factory 128M DIMM back in the laptop when they tested it? Sure enough, I replaced the 256M DIMM with the factory 128M DIMM, and life is good again. I've finally got kernel 2.4.6 up and running, and my Orinoco Gold card is working with the 2.4.x module orinoco_cs. Good news. I'm in the process of rebuilding the laptop still, but I tar'red up most of the config info on the old install, so it should not take that long. I used to use a RedHat package called 'xsri' to set the Debian logo as the root window image for logging in via GDM, but I can't get it to work anymore. Oh well, I'll use XV instead.

03Jul2001 - I got up this morning, went to turn the laptop on, and *NOTHING HAPPENED*. I was really starting to get mad. But after I thought about it for a bit, I decided to put the old 128M RAM chip back into the laptop. Sure enough, it's working now. I'll put the 256M module back in to double check that it really was the problem, but after I get the laptop up and running again software-wise. I've added my current fdisk -l /dev/hda and /etc/fstab to my CVS tree. Notice that the root filesystem is ext2, not reiserfs as it was previously. Before I killed my laptop, I was having problems with a root reiserfs partition. Also, now /boot is on the same partition as the rest of the / filesystem, and it's too much work to make it reiser and have everything be happy (see the mkreiserfs -notail option for more info on why you can't put a kernel onto a normal reiser partition). I'm now using xosl now as my primary bootloader, and it's way cool. I'll still be using lilo in Linux for implementing PCMCIA schemes, but the xosl GUI is really cool. BTW, when you look at the output of fdisk -l /dev/hda above, you'll see xosl's partition type is 0x78. I think it's just a DOS partition, but you could always go read the source and see for yourself.

02Jul2001 (Later) - I forgot to check the power switch at the back of the laptop; it was switched off. Duh. So the laptop does work, and it only took about 7 calendar days to fix. I'm happy. Note to self: when your new kernel does'nt boot, you don't have to remove the power and battery to shut off the laptop; there's a switch that does it for you on the back.

02Jul2001 - $1000US worth of parts, I have my laptop back. Note that since it's still under warranty, I did'nt have to pay for it. This is why I like extended service contracts on laptops. Laptops are too small to guarantee nothing will ever happen to it. Where I used to work, I'd send out a laptop a month to get worked on, and this was out of an office of 30 or so laptop users. Since I got a new battery, there's no charge on it, and all of my power supplies are at home, I have no idea if everything works yet, I'll be finding out later I guess. Here's what got replaced:

• VGA/Power board - $25US
• Motherboard with PIII 600Mhz CPU - $850US
• Primary Battery - $110US
• Bridge Battery - $12US
• Upper Cover Assembly $35US

25Jun2001 - It's official, I've blown up my laptop. After I reinstalled Potato, I was trying to get kernel 2.4 to play nice (it would not mount a root filesystem after I Reiser-ized it), I pulled the power and the battery to try and get the system to recover from being locked. Unlike my Toshibas, I've not found a hard reset button on this laptop, so what I have been doing is pulling the battery and power cords to get the thing to reset. I did it one to many times, it seems. So now I will be able to find out first hand how good Fujitsu's service department is, as I've sent the laptop to their Memphis headquarters service depot. The good news is that I blamed the lockup on Windows 98 :). Watch for updates here.

13Jun2001 - Latest toy: SMC Wireless Barricade router/wireless access point. Wireless works with OpenBSD, Windows 98, but not the Linux 2.2 pcmcia wvlan_cs PCMCIA drivers. The wvlan_cs driver does work at my work, where we have the Lucent access points. So at this point, I'm baffled as to why it does not work. But right now, I have bigger fish to fry. Starting about 2 weeks ago, my laptop stopped shutting down correctly. It would hang at stopping PCMCIA. Now I can't even keep Linux up for longer than a 1/2 hour before the laptop either freezes or spontaniously reboots. Nothing in the system logs as to what's going on. Only way I can get the machine to run for longer than 1/2 hour is to boot in single user mode. If I go runlevel 3 or into X with runlevel 5, the machine will eventually die. I've just upgraded the kernel to 2.4 in hopes that it will fix the freeze/reboot problem (and hopefully the SMC wireless problem too), but I just had it lock on me in X again. It doesn't do this in Windows, so I'm thinking I hosed something. *Stumped*. On a somewhat nicer note, if you go into the BIOS and set the supervisor password in the Security menu, you will then get the choice to set the Owner setting, which is actually pretty cool. When the laptop boots, whatever you put into the Owner box will show up at the very bottom of the screen in whatever colors you choose. I have my name and address in Black on Yellow, and it looks very cool. Also good if the laptop gets stolen, probably the only way to pull the supervisor's password is to send the machine back to Fujitsu.

22May2001 - I've changed the hostname of my laptop, it's now called Macleod instead of Logan5. This week's gadget? Wireless ethernet! Yes folks, after dropping $300 and some people networking, I'm now the proud owner of 2 Lucent Orinoco Gold Wavelan cards. At home, I use one in a ISA to PCMCIA bridge, and at work they have wireless access points already set up. If I have not plugged PCMCIA Schemes yet, let me stop and do so now. On most of my other laptops, I've used PCMCIA schemes to set up my computer for whatever network I want to use after boot. It beats the hell out of doing it by hand, and I can do things like get my laptop from off to masquerade in like 5 minutes flat. It's great. I'm using schemes with the wireless NIC to change my encryption keys and frequencies on the fly. There's also a cool WM applet called wmwave that will show you the statistics of the wireless card.

10May2001 - Page is now on a new home on my cable modem. Playing with Infrared, so far I've got my Palm III and my Nokia 8290 phone talking to my laptop. Unfortunatly, I did not make any notes when I was playing with it, so I'll have to do it from scratch so I can document it here. Here's a screenshot of minicom with the infrared port set up to be the serial port. This screenshot shows me doing ATI queries to the Nokia :).I also started playing with the Linux Progress Patch , it shows a graphic on the screen when you start up the computer. You need to compile in and start the machine with a frame buffer console, but it's worth it IMO :). To get the machine to boot in the frame buffer, you need to tell the kernel to use the framebuffer device: vga=0x305 in /etc/lilo.conf works great for this laptop. To make the boot console messages show up on another console (for troubleshooting), you can add an append line to your lilo stanza like this:

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=ob
read-only
append="SCHEME=ob console=/dev/tty2 CONSOLE=/dev/tty2"


SCHEME is for PCMCIA schemes (see the PCMCIA-HOWTO on Sourceforge ), and the console/CONSOLE is to tell the framebuffer code where to send console output. Use Alt-F1 and Alt-F2 to switch back and forth between the graphics and the console messages. Since I boot up in runlevel 5, there's only 1 getty running on tty1, and tty2 gets anything that the computer sends to /dev/console. Logins are accomplished via GDM.

28Mar2001 - If you did'nt see the note at the top of this page, I'm due to loose my DSL connection by Friday the 30th of March. This page is not going away, but it will probably go down for a few days. I've been getting a few questions about the modem, so I've posted the output of lspci -vv, and here's what the output of the lspci command is . I've had people tell me that the modem may not be compatable with the Lucent binary drivers, but I don't use the modem, I use a 3Com 3C765 PCMCIA modem card. I just pulled the cover off of the modem/ethernet sub-board assembly, and checked for myself. One of the chips on the modem sub-board is labeled "Scorpio", and according to the Winmodems are not Linmodems page , there's no driver that works in Linux. Sorry.

18Mar2001 Addendum - Scored the Debian package for wmbubble/bubblemon (same thing) from my friend John Robinson the 4th, you can get it with apt-get if you add the following to your /etc/apt/sources file: deb http://people.debian.org/~jaqque potato main contrib non-freeand deb-src http://people.debian.org/~jaqque potato main contrib non-free. Change the "potato" to "woody" if you are using that branch, he has 2 versions of that package. Then apt-get install wmbubble , and you are done!

18Mar2001 - New desktop, along with some new dockapps; First, view the screenshot, then I'll list the dockapps. They are in order: bubblemon v1.3, wmapm, wmWeather, wmifs, wmMoonClock, wmGrabImage (with the same URL as the entry on Feb. 27th), wmusic (an XMMS controller, very cool), wmix (another very cool applet), and wmtz. The theme is called River, you can find it at wm.themes.org. As you can see, there's an On Screen Display (OSD) lookalike thingy running now, called XOSD; it works with XMMS as a plugin, and it also watches /dev/mixer so that when you make changes to either of those two things (move the volume up and down, or play an MP3 in XMMS), the OSD will pop up on the screen, and tell you what's going on. Any program can build against the XOSD libraries, so you can write your applications so that they have an On-Screen Display :). In Windows, the OSD pops up when you use the keyboard to adjust the volume (I think that runs thru the BIOS). So it's not 100% the same as Windows, but fuck it, it's awesome nonetheless. The other thing you see in that screenshot is a new Instant Messaging client called EveryBuddy ; it's awesome, it allows you to use AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and Jabber messaging systems all in one client.

12Mar2001 - New toy - Epson 1240U Photo USB scanner. Little bit of work with SANE, and it's now up and running through GIMP/XSANE across the USB port, very nice. I've had a pile of crap that would be better off being digitized instead of laying around my office taking up horizontal space. Here's a link about how a user set up his Epson 1640 up with SANE ; all you really need to make sure on the laptop's part is that you have the USB scanner module compiled and ready to go (strangely enough, it's called 'scanner.o'). The rest of it is setting up SANE with the Epson module, and then linking in the plugin for GIMP. It's all explained in the SANE manpages, so I won't duplicate. BTW, the Windows drivers/software for the scanner are still in the bag with the install manuals. Fuck Windows :) On the touchpad scrollbutton issue, I looked at the source for the X Glidepad driver, and it is only looking for left/right mouse buttons, and tap events, not the 5th and 6th buttons (tap is 4th 'button' to that driver) that the scrollbutton would trigger. I don't know how to get the raw data that the scrollbuttons would give me, so that I can try to hack at the driver. I'm going to post to the X mailing lists, and see if there is anyone working on something, or at least let them know that this hardware is loose and running around in the real world. As always, check back here for more info.

08Mar2001 - I've added some personal comments about this laptop in the Overview section. USB floppy works, the two modules I loaded yesterday were there today when I booted the system this morning, I just plugged in the floppy and stuffed a disk in there, and the system sees it as a SCSI drive. In the system's /etc/fstab, I've copied and commented out the old /dev/fd0 line, and changed /dev/fd0 in the new line to /dev/sda . The floppy device will take up the whole device, it's not like a hard drive where you can have partitions, therefore having /dev/sda1, sda2, etc. If you have another SCSI device on your system, then the /dev/sda for the USB floppy may to move to something else. So to mount a floppy, use 'mount -t auto /dev/sda /floppy'. I also got LICQ compiled with SSL and working, I had compiled a couple of different LICQ versions but every time I run it, I'd have timeout problems. The version of LICQ that I'm running is 1.02, which needs QT 2.1 or better, so you'll have some compiling work ahead of you if you want to try it. The trick I used to get LICQ working was to NOT copy all of my old config files over, to let LICQ build my config from scratch, and add back all of my contacts by hand. Ugh. My friend has used the SSL enabled LICQ with another SSL-enabled ICQ client, and he says it rocks. And ICQ2000 not having SSL support is a good thing to tease all of your Windows bigot friends with :).

07Mar2001 - I've found some info about USB floppies in the Linux USB Guide at Sourceforge. Basically, you will need to compile in SCSI support in the kernel, then a USB mass storage driver will become available in the USB section of the kernel source. The specific kernel options you are looking for are "SCSI Support < >" on the SCSI menu (I chose 'M' for module), and in the USB section, "< > USB Mass Storage Support" (again 'M' for module). A 'make modules; make modules_install' later, I had two modules called scsi_mod.o and usb-storage.o; I inserted these modules via insmod, and things are still OK. Unfortunately, I don't have my USB floppy on me, so I'll have to wait until late tonight to test it. If/when this works, the floppy is supposed to be seen by the system as a SCSI drive, so it will probably end up being something like /dev/sda. Stay tuned.

05Mar2001 - Had an interesting thing happen to me on Saturday. I had rebooted the laptop, and was running off the battery with about 50% or so charge left, and when the kernel got to the Intel eepro100 driver, it would not load! I tried to load it by hand, but no luck. My guess, because I was not using the LAN jack ( I was on dialup all day because my DSL was down, and I was over at a friend's house that afternoon, no network whatsoever), the BIOS had shut off the LAN jack. I would have tested my theory out by connecting the machine to a ethernet network, but I was at a place with no network beyond what the telephone company gives you. Setting up the 3Com 3C756 56k PCMCIA modem card in Debian was a pleasure, thanks to wvdial. It turns out that I had already entered the username and password for my emergency dialup connection when wvdial was first installed, all I had to do was pop the modem in, and run wvdialconf to have it look for the modem card, which it found with no problems. 49.3kb connection speed from Ocean Beach. I also got a new Logitech Optical Wheel Mouse as my newest toy, and it works great. It's a little bit faster (i.e. better resolution) in X, so your mouse cursor will really fly now. Speaking of wheel mice, I got imwheel to work, so now I can scroll Netscape/terms with the wheel in X. Please read the above Debian X entry for more dirt. No, the Glidepad scroll buttons still do not work in Linux, I don't know if that's because the X driver for a Glidepad does not have the capability to read past 3 buttons or what. I've also compiled gPhoto, and I use my Kodak DC280 camera's USB connection with gPhoto to download pictures and thumbnails from the camera, it's very fast and nice.

27Feb2001 - Obligatory screenshot. All of the big things work, so all that's left over are little things, like the volume is always muted when you start the computer and whatnot. The WindowMaker dockapps from top to bottom are: wmbubble, wmapm, wmWeather, wmifs, wmSpaceWeather, wmMoonClock, wmcalc, wmGrabImage (going to http://www.goes.noaa.gov/GIFS/WCI7.JPG), wmtz, and wmmixer. All of the above dockapps are linked from Ben Sinclair's DockApp Warehouse. Unga, go now, much good stuff. Since I'm using the OSS module in ALSA, wmmixer works fine, but it does'nt understand all of the channels. I'm using XAmixer or gamix for heavy duty usage. The terms are aterms, check Freshmeat for the URL. aterm.pl is the script that I use to bring up an aterm with a random tint/transparency color; it's a perl script. I'm going to link my 'alsasound' system init script from my CVS tree, this will save/restore your mixer settings so that you don't have to turn the mixer on every time you boot your computer.

08Feb2001 - I got sound working last night!!! Please see the above Debian section on sound to see what my ./configure line was, and which modules to load. I called Fujitsu on the 7th, and I spoke with a very helpful person named Lou (Thanks Lou!), and he did his best to try and tell me which chipset this laptop uses, but they just don't give the tech support people that info. What tipped me off as to what ALSA would like, was this PDF from Fujitsu-Siemens, which said that the laptop uses the Intel 440MX chipset for audio. That's when I started to see that Yamaha may be providing the specific sound hardware, but the AC97 standard controls audio through the motherboard chipset, and this laptop's motherboard uses the 440MX chipset. So the 440MX chipset is a layer of abstraction for the actual Yamaha sound hardware that is built into this thing. Not that it matters too much, just as long as I can listen to my MP3's, I'm a happy man.

05Feb2001 - I shorted out the docking brick about a week ago so that the laptop won't get AC mains power when it's in the docking brick, so I can't use the parallel port or any of the other ports in the brick for any length of time. Bummer. Update Mar 8th, 2001 - the docking brick is working again, so I don't know what the hell happened. Maybe it has some kind of internal circut breaker or something. Who knows... I'm playing phone tag with the Fujitsu US support people about which sound card is in this laptop. I've got WindowMaker dialed in with all of my favorite dockapps, my current theme is Floyd. Here's the gratuitous screenshot. Unga! Floyd baybee!!. My typing speed is coming back up with this keyboard layout, I'm so used to the Toshiba keyboard layouts, this one is a lot different.