[Sderby] Linux on a laptop.

[Graham Hamblin]

Hiyer Harry

Still playing without success.    The Numlock is still operative at the 
point it hangs.   Are you able to tell me how to force the DMA off when 
booting at the command line?   There are only minimum facilities in the 
bios and nothing of that nature.

Apologies for being a pest, it's a whole new ball park for me.

Graham

On Friday 27 Feb 2004 4:30 pm, Harry Sheppard wrote:
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> Hi Graham,
>
> > The rest it still stops at
> > Partition check:
> >  hda:
>
> Hmmm - at the point it hangs, if you toggle NumLock, does the NumLock
> LED / incicator / whatever toggle on and off? As stupid as it sounds,
> toggling NumLock is a very reliable way of knowing if a system has
> really frozen or is just timing out repetitively. If the machine's
> using an old (read "obscure") IDE chipset, it may well be arguing
> over DMA and timing out. You can normally force DMA off with a kernel
> parameter at boot time which, while making your processor very aware
> of every disk operation that happens, is usually quite failsafe.
>
> > The hard drive is IBM-DLGA-23080, ATA Disk Drive
> > The CDROM Toshiba CD-ROM XM-2402B, Atapi.
>
> Both standard parts - they themselves shouldn't be causing a
> problem...
>
> > Ok I had this one to have a play just to see if it was worth having
> > a laptop next time round cos I have an old box which needs
> > replacing and if the answer is a load of problems then ir's No but
> > I liked the idea.
>
> It can be a bit of a minefield, however there are various listings on
> the web that list tested laptop systems. Try Googling for 'linux
> laptop compatible list' and see what it dredges up.
>
> I had a right song-and-dance trying to coax Linux on to my Sony Vaio
> (PGC-FX201 Duron 700) - it was done eventually (and has since been
> extremely reliable) but it took a patched, custom-compiled kernel and
> a lot of prodding of XFree86 to get anything that even resembled a
> working system. Laptop chipsets seem to be quite literally "flavour
> of the month" - the specification being so nebulus that developing
> for them is a pain in the back side...
>
> > I think this laptop is designed expressly for Windows and if so
> > it's a bin job.
>
> I suppose it all boils down to the amount of time you're willing to
> spend on it - I'm sure you could probably compile a custom kernel
> that will work (e.g. one that includes a patch for a flawed IDE
> chipset - can we say "CMD640"?) but it is highly frustrating and time
> consuming. A more recent laptop is more likely to work, however if
> you went for a bleeding-edge one, the chances of getting every device
> working immediately become more unlikely once again.
>
> Just as a thought, does the boot disc you're using have the PCIutils
> package available? Try
>
> # lspci
>
> If it's there, you'll get a complete PCI device listing which,
> hopefully, includes your IDE controller, e.g:
>
> 00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc.
> VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT8233/A/C/VT8235 PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev
> 10)
>
> If it _IS_ a CMD chipset, then you might have found the problem...
>
> Anyway, best of luck,
> - --Harry
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-- 
Graham Hamblin
Red Hat Linux 9
===============