Not getting much work done today -- spending time playing with my new laptop. It hasn't booted Windows, as I stuck a Debian testing install CD in right away. What annoying hardware on laptops! Stupid i810 AC97 audio driver is crap (I guess I have to play with ALSA to get it to behave). The ATI Radeon chipset it has isn't yet supported in XFree86 4.x (though I hear it's supported in the CVS version, and 4.2 should handle it). I haven't been able to get AGP working, and I'm sure I totally horked something when I installed the box.
Oh well, at least there's something on the hard drive that boots and comes up with X (though in unaccelerated VESA mode).
I had problems after installing because I immediately went to the 2.4.16/17 kernel, which would die after a few minutes when an APM BIOS event of some sort occurred (ie, telling the system that a fan had spun up). Thankfully, someone else had run into the problem before, and I borrowed their kernel .config and built a new kernel..
I guess I thought the laptop had a firewire port on it, but I don't see one. The Linux APM driver apparently doesn't report the battery level, though it may be confused since I have two batteries installed at the moment.. (Hmm.. let me check -- yep! as soon as I take out the second battery, APM tools start working properly).
Networking is going to be an interesting challenge, though I suspect I'll try to rig up something where the system checks for a change in link status on the ethernet jack. Just plug in a cable, and get a DHCP client going automatically (someone *must* have done that already)
Anyway, having fun playing. I should really get back to work, though...
Later
Got ALSA working, though that's going to turn into yet another thing to compile whenever I want to do a kernel upgrade.. I'm glad folks are planning to include it in the base kernel in 2.5/2.6 (or whatever). The sound card is a crappy AC97 thing that only understands 48000Hz sound. Funky. That wouldn't be too bad if most stuff was encoded at 48000Hz, but most stuff (save for DVDs) are 44100Hz. *sigh*
As I expected, once the net battery charge on my two batteries went down to 50%, the kernel APM driver saw a 100% charge, and started working it's way down. Strange that when I remove the primary battery, things break again, but when I remove the second battery, the APM driver reports the actual charge on the primary battery.. Weird..
Tried playing with hibernation a bit. I want to get suspend-to-disk working, mostly just for the hell of it. The system boots up in 35 seconds as it is, so it's not a huge deal. Also, the system already goes into a near-hibernation state when I do a normal suspend. The lights all turn off after a few seconds, so you don't even know it's suspended. If that's just a suspend-to-RAM deal, I think it's bad... Someone could close their laptop, forget about it, and have the battery slowly drain away...
Posted by mike at January 10, 2002 01:43 PM | Laptop , Old Advogato Diary , XFree | TrackBack