Specifications
General Impression
Installing RH 6.0
Installing RH 6.1
Getting True Type Fonts to work with RH 6.X
Link to other resources
This is my first notebook, bought after quite an extensive research on the cheapest and yet affordable and has all the standard specifications found in a more expensive notebook. I did a comparison with the non-OEM model from Mitac and the price different of RM1000 (USD$250) really made me to choose the OEM version (locally branded) Digitek Mediapad. I rate this notebook 8 out of 10 in term of features and stability, 3 out of 10 in term of battey life, and humm.. may be 5 out of 10 for overall value.When I bought this notebook, I have Linux in my mind. I was not that worried about compatibility or difficulties with Linux installation since I have run Linux since Linux 0.99plX and I have a trust that this notebook could take it without much a problem. Linux has since become my main operating system on this notebook and I've no problem using it in the office too since the applications for Linux are as good as in Win9X. I have SAP R/3 SapGUI, StarOffice 5.1 for office suite and few other important applications running on my notebook. The only reason I keep Win98 in another smaller partition is due to Lotus Notes Client, which is the standard in the office. I have tried in vain to get WINE to work with it.
The first Linux distribution I tried on it was RH 5.1, bought the CheapBytes version of it and it went without a hitch other than the LILO tried to update the MBR without success. After few trials, I found that the initial BIOS setup has "Bootsector Protect" feature turned on and that contribute to the LILO problem. The initial setup does not have the special partition for "Suspend to Disk" created and the supplied DOS utility called OVMAKFIL fixed that problem. I have no problem upgrading my RH 5.1 to RH 5.2 until when I RH 6.0 released.The RH 6.0 has quite a lot of enhancements and changes compared to the previous RH distributions and I had trouble in installing it on this notebook. The notebook was freeze when the RH 6.0 installer tried to probe the mouse. Fixed this problem by putting the machine into suspend to disk mode and when it was turned back on, the installation process did continue without any problem.
Sound card, APM, PCMCIA etc. works just great on this notebook. XFree86 works too but I still have a problem when waking up from the standby mode or suspend mode, the screen will messed up but doing ctl-alt-backspace will fix that. The only solution that I can think of right now is to go into CUI before putting the notebook into suspend mode. To fix the problem when waking up from standby mode, turn off dpms support using xset or turn of display standby mode in the BIOS.
When RedHat 6.1 was made available for public, I went to one of our local Linux CD distributor and got myself their version of RH 6.1 which cost me RM8 (USD$2) (www.solinique.com.my). The CD is not that good or properly burned and it gave me a 'jet' swirling sound and I've problem installing it in few instances. I couldn't get the graphical installer to work and it gave me an error saying "error opening security policy /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Xserver/SecurityPolicy". RH 6.1 installer is quite buggy and it frozen my keyboard few times during the installation. Putting the PC to standby mode (Fn+F12) solved the problem.Sound configuration:I opted for fresh installation since I know RH usually changed something in their new releases espically the location of config files. I did a backup of all my important files into my Dos partition just so I can get it back easily. I did miss some of my config files which I can recreated again tho' in pain :)
RH 6.1 installation is not that smooth for me and my keyboard was frozen few times during the installation phase. I heard that the current installer is quite buggy and there is an update for it in RedHat webpage. I was first selected the KDE Workstation install and found out that it created an extended partition and create an extra partition which hold '/boot' and not to my liking, I tried to reinstall back RH 6.1 using custom instal. This created more problem since the brain dead DiskDruid (RH partition editor) doesn't let me delete the extended nor it will let me create a new parititon under the extended partition. I use the good old fdisk to fix this problem (the /dev/hda doesn't exist so I created one using '# mknod /dev/hda b 3 0').
After I finished the installation, booting it up and I was prompted with a VC login instead of KDM. I guess it went to runlevel 3 when I skipped the GUI configuration. Surely putting some of my RH 6.0 config files doesn't work stright away, some of the news config files were changed and few other config were changed either in location or the contents of it. A little tweaking with the config file let me have my news/mail to work again. The XF86Config file that I've from RH 5.2 days is still working and the one for RH 6.0 works without a need to modify it. My XF86Config is available here too.
I've just received an e-mail from Nathan Myers (Aug 21, 1999) about his Mitac 5033 OEM notebook:
"It is a good idea to put a "guard" over the power switch, or you often hit it accidentally. This is no big problem in MSWin, but it's hell on your uptime report.
If you put more than 64M of RAM in, only the first 64M gets cached, and the whole system runs slower. The only possible fix I know of is to put in a K6/3 and turn off the motherboard cache.
I have a fix for the X/resume problem, as outlined in
http://www.linuxlaptops.com/ll/xresume.html"
After trying the above solution without much success, I downloaded the latest apmd from the official apmd webpage at http://www.worldvisions.ca/~apenwarr/apmd/. The latest apmd has /etc/apmd_proxy, a program dispatcher for APM daemon which is called whenever the state of any power management function has changed. Inside this script, I enabled the change to console 1 (using chvt) before going into suspend or standby mode and change back to console 7 (default for my X) when resuming. This work great on my system, this fix will be temporary until the X team can come up with better way of resetting the display after resuming from suspend/standby mode.
Put the following entries into your /etc/conf.modules
alias sound sbXF86Config:
pre-install sound insmod sound dmabuf=1
alias midi opl3
options opl3 io=0x388
options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 mpu_io=0x330
# This to allow the X start-up even when the mouse init is failed
Section "ServerFlags"
AllowMouseOpenFail
EndSection
# If you don't have the xfs running as a service (RH 6.0 should
# have this run as a service), hardcode the fontpaths yourself
Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "unix/:-1"
EndSection
#
Section "Keyboard"
Protocol "Standard"
AutoRepeat 500 5
LeftAlt Meta
RightAlt Meta
ScrollLock Compose
XkbKeycodes "xfree86"
XkbTypes "default"
XkbCompat "default"
XkbSymbols "us(pc101)"
XkbGeometry "pc"
XkbRules "xfree86"
XkbModel "pc101"
XkbLayout "us"
EndSection
# I am using Logitech M-S48 interchangeably with the touch pad and the following
# section works great
Section "Pointer"
Protocol "MouseManPlusPS/2"
Device "/dev/psaux"
ZAxisMapping 4 5
Buttons 5
EndSection
#
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Mitac TFT"
VendorName "Mitac"
ModelName "12.1in TFT"
HorizSync 25-88
VertRefresh 40-160
Modeline "800x600" 50 800 856 976 1040 600 637 643 666 +hsync +vsync
EndSection
#
Section "Device"
Identifier "TG 9660 / Cyber9385"
VendorName "Trident"
BoardName "Unknown"
Option "linear"
Option "lcd_center"
Option "power_saver"
EndSection
# **********************************************************************
# Screen sections
# **********************************************************************
# The Colour SVGA server
Section "Screen"
Driver "svga"
Device "TG 9660 / Cyber9385"
Monitor "Mitac TFT"
BlankTime 10
StandbyTime 10
SuspendTime 15
OffTime 20
Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "800x600"
ViewPort 0 0
Virtual 800 600
EndSubsection
EndSection
Surely you have been wondering why on earth the letters appearing inside your Netscape are so small and is there any way that you can make it better, just like when you're using it from the other side of your partition (read Win9x). There is easiest way to achive this when you're running RH 6.0 and above. Steps you need to get True Type Fonts working :Step 1.
Make sure you've the following rpm packages installed:Step 2.
- chkfontpath
- freetype
- XFree86-xfsTo check, do:
# rpm -qa | grepChange directory to where your Win9x fonts directory is mounted. e.g. my vfat partition is mounted as /dos. So I do the followingStep 3.
# cd /dos/windows/fontsCreate fonts.dir file which list out your fonts using ttmkfdir.Step 4.
# ttmkfdir > fonts.dirAdd your TTF font directory into xfs font path.Step 5.
# chkfontpath --add /dos/windows/fontsThere is no step 5 :) Just check out if the just added fonts are all there. Using utilities such as xfontsel or your KDE FontManager, check if they're in. If not, then this is your step 5:
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart