Linux on a Gateway Solo 450

I'm running Fedora Core 1, dual-booted with Windows XP (Professional). I've given Windows 8 GB and Linux gets the rest of the 40 GB drive.

Overall I'm fairly pleased with the 450.

Important Note: I do not have the "Centrino" version of the 450. In particular, the miniPCI wireless card on my machine advertises itself as a "Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE" and is handled by the orinoco and orinoco_cs drivers.

I originally installed RedHat 7.3 (see original installation notes) and recently upgraded to Fedora Core 1, mostly because RedHat dropped support for RH 7.3.

Things that work:

• XCDroast -- works fine. I haven't tried writing a CD-RW yet, but given the low cost of CD-R media it's not likely I will anytime in the near future. They seem to have fixed the business with needed to run "xhost +" before it will start up. Note also that in this version, XCD-Roast is on the "System Tools" menu under "CD Writer".

• Sound -- worked fine; I didn't have to run sndconfig or anything. I don't know if that's a result of the RH7.3 install or if Fedora is just better at dealing with sound.

• DVD's -- Xine works; I haven't tried Ogle yet. I suspect that some of the libraries I installed under RH7.3 allow Xine to read DVDs, but I'm not sure. I'm actually getting used to the Xine API, contorted though it is. Plus it turns out that you can set up the menus (Preferences->CD Properties) to launch Xine whenever you pop a DVD in the drive.

• Wireless works the way it used to. There's a new "Wireless link monitor" you can add to the panel but I haven't tried it yet. The scripts I wrote (including the lines I added to rc.local) are still intact and still seem to work.

• X -- Fedora Core 1 has XFree86 4.3 with the newer Radeon drivers, which means that DRI support actually works now. Here's my new XF86Config-4 file, with DRI enabled. I can run Tux Racer again! Happy happy joy joy. Switching virtual consoles works just fine.

• USB -- it properly detects my USB camera and I can mount the device and read its contents. I haven't yet tried any other USB devices. USB support was one of the weak spots in RH 7.3.

• Firewire (aka 1384) -- the firewire port now gets detected properly during boot, I think, and a module to run it gets loaded. I don't have any Firewire devices so I haven't actually tested it yet.

• Grip works fine. It didn't like to old configuration when I first fired it up, but it was kind enough to save the old config so I was able to patch the config with the really important bits.

Things I haven't checked yet:

• The modem

Glitches:

• The lpd/lpr installation was totally messed up. I suspect that this was because when I was running 7.3 I used lpd/lpr exclusively and never upgraded to CUPS; Fedora Core 1 on the other hand seems to be set up exclusivley for CUPS so the installation just didn't know how to handle my setup. It managed to delete all the lpr/lpd excutables but wasn't able to install the CUPS executables; as a result, all sorts of symbolic links in /etc/alternatives were pointing to non-existent lpr executables instead of CUPS executables. The only clue I had about this was when I tried to set up my networked printers and got really strange error messages; then when I ran "lpq" to find out what was going on I found out the executable was missing. From that piece of information I traced the twisty maze of symbolic links from /usr/bin through /etc/alternatives and back to /usr/bin/. I ended up having to delete the links in /etc/alternative and putting in the appropriate links, after which everything worked fine.
  

• up2date -- One of the first things that I like to do with a new install is get all the updates, so I fired up up2date and let it do its thing. Unfortunately its thing consisted of informing me that there were lots of new packages available (including a new kernel) and then hanging as it tried to download the first package. Not very friendly. Sometimes it started downloading packages, but most often didn't even get that far. I ran the non-gui version ("up2date-nox -uv") to see if I could detect what was going on. Usually it just hung but occassionally it started a download, only to bomb out with an error message to the effect that the package's GPG signature was incorrect.
  I did some research (thanks, Jacob!) and found out that the problem is that RedHat's servers are just so busy that up2date can't handle it. The solution is to point up2date at one of the mirrors, which turns out to be harder to do than you might think. Firstly, not all of the mirrors are set up in the up2date format; secondly, as far as I can tell the only way to get up2date to point to a mirror is to edit /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources. I changed the lines

  http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-1 yum updates-released
  http://fedora.redhat.com/linux/fedora/core/updates/1/ 

  to

  # yum fedora-core-1 http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-1 
  # yum updates-released http://fedora.redhat.com/linux/fedora/core/updates/1/ 
  yum fedora-core-1 http://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/core/1/i386/ 
  yum updates-released http://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/core/updates/1/
  

  and now I'm getting updates from rpmfind.net. If you do an google search on "fedora up2date" you can get more information on this (for example this posting).

• rebuilding the kernel. I usually rebuild the kernel so I can turn on FIFO and hardware-assisted ECP-mode support on the parallel port, so I did the usual -- rebuilt the kernel and the modules from the kernel-source rmp. Almost immediately I ran into problems -- the kernel build bombed out with some sort of linker error. I did some research and found this bugzilla entry which seems to describe the problem I had. Based on what I could make of this information, I modified my usuall build procedure to do the following:

      make mrproper
      make xconfig
      make oldconfig
      make dep
      make bzImage
      make modules
  

  and the build seemed to succeed.

  Then I did

      make modules_install
  

  ... and my wireless connection stopped working. Yuck. So I reinstalled the modules (actually, I reinstalled the entire kernel rpm) and everything worked fine again. So finally I just took the parport_c.o and stuffed it into the proper directories, and now the parallel port does what I want it to do.

  I hope they really got this fixed as the bugzilla entry seems to imply; in the meantime, I recommend that if you rebuild the kernel or the modules that you leave yourself a quick way to get back to your original kernel.

• Suspend still doesn't work. Well, it almost works, but after returning from suspend the computer runs really really really slowly. I may experiment with ACPI again at some point.

Annoyances:

• When you minimize a window it does this fancy shrink-the-outline-down-to-the-menu-panel thing. It takes a long time and it's really annoying. Is there any way to turn that off?

• Speaking of windows, it used to be that you could set up the windows manager so that you could drag apps from one workspace to another. Very convenient when you want to superimpose a window from one workspace on top of a window from another workspace. There was a setting in the window manager where you could tell it to pop application windows from one workspace to another if you dragged it to the edge. Now it appears that the only way to accomplish the same thing is to minimize the app in one workspace and then restore it to another workspace. I don't like that because I prefer to have minimized apps restored to their native workspace and in fact I've had problem with apps restoring where I didn't want them (I'm in the habit of clicking on an app's entry on the menu bar to switch to that app's workspace, and if it happens to minimized when I do that things get all messed up). Anyone know of any other way to move an app from one workspace to another?

• The fonts suck. The fonts, and getting them configured so that the desktop could fit enough stuff on it, was one of the reasons I resisted migrating to RH8 or RH9, and unfortunately Fedora has most of the same schemes and font rendering system as RH9. Why is it that no one can set up X so that terminal windows can be set up 80 columns wide and take up only half of a 1024-pixel wide screen? They used to be able to do that way back on Sun workstations running SunOS. What is it about the world today that dictates that the only decent looking fonts are the big ones?

• They changed the key bindings. Again. How come whenever a new version comes out the default shortcuts get changed? What's wrong with a little consistency? Yes I know you can change the shortcuts, but if you work on more than one computer (and who doesn't these days?) you tend learn to use the default settings so that when you go to a strange computer you won't have trouble.

• OK, this is really minor but it took me a while to figure out. All those settings you used to have in ".Xdefaults"? Move them to a file called ".Xresources". You'll be much happier; the current X setup doesn't know from .Xdefaults, but it does know from .Xresources.

Various screenshots of my windows environment setup can be found here. I include them mostly to help me document what I've done, but you may find them useful.

    I had the same problem with booting using the Windows CD without
    Linux installed at all.  I flat out could not get the thing to boot
    from CDROM until I found that if I pressed F8 during the Windows XP
    boot and then picked reboot from the menu that it would boot from
    CDROM when the laptop rebooted.  The same thing ocurred when I tried
    to boot the RH8 CD.

    This just seems like an amazingly bad Solo bug.  Also, I do not understand
    why the Large Disk Access option in the BIOS would have anything to
    do with this and I would be surprised if it did.

Added 19 August 2003: My XF86Config-4 file.

Added 12 June 2003: Neall Doren provides more information.

Getting XCDroast to work

• I followed the directions in the file /usr/share/doc/xcdroast-0.98a9/README.nonroot and changed permissions on various files. I'm not sure, however, that this was either necessary or useful, because xcdroast still wants to be run as root (it asks for a root password when launched, and any files it creates are owned by root. Perhaps Red Hat made patches to xcdroast that prevent non-root users from running xcdroast.

• Even after making the previous changes, if you try to run xcdroast it will fail with the following errors:

      Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
      Xlib: No protocol specified
      Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0

  To get around this, run the following from a terminal prompt after starting X:

      xhost + 

  I don't know why this is necessary.

• xcdroast will not allow you to erase a CD-RW because of a problem with the interface to cdrecord that I believe happens because this machine has a combined CD-ROM/CDRW drive. If you tell cdrecord to erase (blank) a CD-RW disk, it responds with the following:

      cdrecord: Drive needs to reload the media to return to proper status.

  pops the CD out and waits for the response. I believe that xcdroast doesn't know how to handle this, so if you want to erase a CD-RW you need to do it by running cdrecord directly (the command

  cdrecord dev=/dev/sg0 blank=minimal

  will do the trick; note that you have to run this as root).

• Make sure you set the proper read (24X) and write (8X) speeds on the xcdroast setup/CD Settings page (and be sure to save your configuration!). If you don't do this it will take forever to burn a CD.

Getting DVDs to work

Getting Wireless to Work

• miniPCI cards are actually just another type of PCMCIA card (well, "PC Card", or perhaps "Cardbus Card", officially, but everybody calls them PCMCIA cards), so on boot the pcmcia subsystem always beeps when it discovers the card, and it always beeps when it shuts down the card when Linux is shut down. I find these beeps annoying, so I turned them off by adding the line "CARDMGR_OPTS=-q" to /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia. This actually turns the beeps off for all sockets, whereas I really just want to turn the beeps off for socket 2, but I can live with that.

• I had to change some settings in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opt to convince the system to set the card up for managed (not ad hoc) operation. I found the section for my card (listed as Lucent Wavelan IEEE (+ Orinoco, RoamAbout and ELSA, with MAC address *,*,*,00:60:1D:* or *,*,*,00:02:2D:*) and commented out the ESSID line and changed the MODE line from "Ad-Hoc" to "managed". The complete section now looks like this:

  # Lucent Wavelan IEEE (+ Orinoco, RoamAbout and ELSA)
  # Melco/Buffalo Networks WLI-PCM-L11
  # Note : wvlan_cs driver only, and version 1.0.4+ for encryption support
  *,*,*,00:60:1D:*|*,*,*,00:02:2D:*)
      INFO="Wavelan IEEE example (Lucent default settings)"
  #    ESSID="Wavelan Network"
      MODE="managed"
  #    RATE="auto"
  #    KEY="s:secu1"
  # To set all four keys, use :
  #   KEY="s:secu1 [1] key s:secu2 [2] key s:secu3 [3] key s:secu4 [4] key [1]"
  # For the RG 1000 Residential Gateway: The ESSID is the identifier on
  # the unit, and the default key is the last 5 digits of the same.
  #   ESSID="084d70"
  #   KEY="s:84d70"
      ;;
  

• Because I didn't like the idea of having the wireless card continually running when there's no access point around, I added the following to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to turn off the card if either it isn't needed or if it couldn't find a connection:

  # Turn off wifi if we don't need it, or if it didn't come up`
  
  test1=`/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr"`
  test2=`/sbin/ifconfig eth1 | grep "inet addr"`
  
  if [ "$test2" = "" -o ! "$test1" = "" ]
  then
     /sbin/cardctl eject 2
  fi    
  

• I also created a root-executable script to make it easier to turn the wireless card on and off manually:

  #! /bin/bash
  
  case "$1" in
      start)
      /sbin/cardctl insert 2
  	;;
      stop)
      /sbin/cardctl eject 2
  	;;
      restart)
      /sbin/cardctl eject 2
      /sbin/cardctl insert 2
  	;;
      status)
  	/sbin/iwconfig eth1
  	;;
      *)
  	echo "Usage: wifi {start|stop|restart|status}"
  	exit 1
  	;;
  esac
  

Tips and Tricks

• If you're going to take the "repartition/reinstall Windows" approach like I did, I suggest you do it before you customize Windows very much because you'll just have to do it all over again.

• When you install Windows on the newly-partitioned drive, do not use the procedure in the Gateway documentation ("Using the Restoration CDs"). They say to boot from the red Drivers CD, but what you should really do is boot from the blue Windows CD. This will allow you to tell the Windows installation that you want to create a partition that doesn't consume the entire drive (I decided on 8 G) and to make it FAT32 instead of NTFS. I suppose I could have left it as NTFS but I'm suspicious of Linux's NTFS support, and I want to be able to read the Windows partition from Linux.

• Also when you install Windows, note that there are only two restoration CDs instead of the three the Gateway documentation talks about. The applications are in the "apps" directory on the red Drivers CD, and only some of those apps show up in the menu that the Drivers CD pops up for you.

• If you intend on using a bigger than 20G drive I suggest you buy it with the machine, rather than separately as I did, since it will probably cost you less. The only advantage of using a new drive is that, if worst comes to worst, I can always pop the original disk back in and be running Windows fairly quickly.

• If you need to repartion the drive, you can use fdisk from the Red Hat installation CD. To do this, you should boot from the Red Hat CD, and when it gets to the "boot:" prompt type "linux rescue" (without the quotes). Select the language and keyboard, then when it gets to the panel with "Continue", "Read-Only", or "Skip" select "Skip". This will dump you into a shell, from which you can run fdisk (and other things, if you want to).

• While partitioning the disk or during installation (I forget which) you may get a warning about the disk being too big for the BIOS. You can ignore this warning.

Glitches

• For some reason the machine keeps losing (not being able to find) the CD-ROM drive. The first time the problem showed up was when I was trying to boot off the Red Hat installation CD -- it kept booting off the hard drive into Windows instead of booting off the CD into the installation. Because of this I had thought it had something to do with running Windows, but now I'm not so sure because I've also seen the problem after running only Linux. It's possible it has something to do with warm boots, but I'm still investigating. Anyway, to get around the problem I went into the BIOS setup (press "F2" during boot), selected the "Advanced" tab, then changed the "Large Disk Access" from "DOS" to "Other". This forced the BIOS to look for, find, and start up the CD-ROM. I was then able to reboot, set the setting back to "DOS", and procede with the Linux installation.

• I haven't even thought about trying to get the modem working, since it's a Winmodem and I don't know if I'll ever need it.

• Suspend does not work in Linux -- the suspend key sequence seems to suspend the machine, but it locks up hard when I try to take it out of suspend.

• Switching consoles in X does not work with the Xfree86 version shipped with RedHat 7.3 -- doing Alt-F2 (for example) to switch to a terminal console works fine, but switching back to X with Ctl-Alt-F7 locks up the machine hard. I understand from doing some research that this is a common problem with ATI Radeon chip sets and that it has something to do with DRI support. There are two ways to deal with this:
  • You can turn off DRI support. I talked via email to Mike Harris of Red Hat who has posted some stuff on the XFree86 Xpert mailing list concerning ATI Radeon problems; he indicated that it's a problem with DRI. So, in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, I commented out the line

    Load "dri" # Direct rendering infrastructure

    by changing it to:

    #  Load "dri" # Direct rendering infrastructure

    (note that you have to do this as root). That seems to have fixed the problem, as well as the "artifacts" many people are seeing when the logout box pops up (see for example this posting ). Of course video performance suffers; run glxgears before and after to see what I mean.

  • You can install a newer version of the XFree86 Radeon driver. In July, Mike Harris posted a version of the file that fixed all the problems except the logout-box artifacts. Unfortunately he's removed that version, so I don't know at this point where to get a copy; perhaps it's available as part of the latest XFree86 release. It's also possible that it's been incorporated into RedHat 8.0. In any case, you "install" the driver by putting it in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers; I suggest saving the original driver by renaming it to "radeon_drv.o.orig" or something like that.

• I bought the machine with a 20 GB drive and had been intending to put a 48 GB 12.7mm high drive I had from my late departed Gateway 2500. The specs said that the drive should fit but the drive bay is just a tad too small. So I bought a 40 GB 9.5mm drive from harddrive.com and they shipped it to me in two days.

• This thing runs hot. I had been hoping to buy a slower, cooler machine but by the time I got around to buying one all the notebook manufacturers were into this speed race. I would have been quite happy with a 1 GHz machine that didn't feel like it was about to burst into flames.

• xcdroast is not able to erase a CD-RW because of a problem with its interface to cdrecord (see above).

Basic Hardware Specs (see also the Gateway 450 specs page)