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OOD

Last updated Sun Jun 5 00:01:31 BST 2005

This is a bit out-of-date but may be of interest. See also Study of Compaq's Evo N1015v laptop with focus on Debian Linux.

The thing weighs, 7 pounds = 3.17514659 kilograms, or thereabouts.

Introduction

Herein chronicles my attempts (and success) at getting Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 "woody" installed on my mother's new Evo laptop.

Contents

Partitioning

I booted a knoppix CD, disabling just about everything (e.g. usb, pcmcia, apm..) and used the program 'qtparted' to resize the windows NTFS partition, making 4GB of space at the end of the hard drive.

This worked for me and left the windows partition intact, but of course you should backup anything important first as its renowned for going wrong.

Installation

I used the Debian 3.0r0 installation ISO, available from some debian CD mirrors, and used the default 2.2 series installation kernel. A memory bug plagues the boot-floppy 2.4 kernel, but is avoidable with a kernel parameter.

I didn't have spare network cables around at the time so I just used the CD on its own for the base system. I avoided installing any packages during this stage, using tasksel, dselect or otherwise. I stuck with the default kernel modules.

Finally, for convenience I copied the CD across to the harddrive so I didn't have to leave the CD in for package management (and forget to remove it on boot thus booting the installation procedure again... argh!): 

# mkdir /debcd1
# mount /cdrom
# cp -r /cdrom/* /debcd1
# echo > /etc/apt/sources.list \
> deb file:/debcd1 contrib main main/non-US contrib/non-US
# apt-get update

Video

The Video chip in the Evo is an ATI mobile radeon or similar. ATI do not offer drivers for this chip, because of vendor customisations. Compaq (now HP) do not offer linux drivers either. These ones from the SUSE ftp work for 2D (and video playback) but not 3D.

Trackpad

The trackpad, or touchpad or whatever you want to call it, works as ExplorerPS2 in XF86Config-4, however it's much better to install a special Synaptics driver. 

# aptitude install xfree86-driver-synaptics qsynaptics

I used the example config stuff from /usr/share/doc/xfree86-driver-synaptics out-of-the-box. if you enable SHM (a way of changing the server settings without restarting the server) you can tweak settings using the qsynaptics tool.

Why install this and not just use ExplorerPS2?

Fake scroll wheels!

This neat little trick is like a best-kept-secret. This synaptics driver lets you use a region of the touchpad as a scrollwheel. Absolute heaven! There's even a circular scrolling option, a bit like an old radio dial, which works particularly on the elliptical trackpad which this Evo sports.