Aerospace Software Ltd.

Notebook Howto

Mandriva 2006

Scope

This document describes how to handle the idiosyncrazies of a Dell Inspiron 1200 Notebook machine. This is a relatively low end machine, with 1.2GHz Celeron M processor, 256MB RAM, CDRW, Synaptic touch pad and Dell 1350 PCMCIA WiFi adaptor.

This machine is an excellent network test and debug machine. It is fast enough and quite sturdy, similar to the old IBM Thinkpad series. It is certainly mechanically more sound than any HPaq I have encountered.

The good news is that with MDV2006, it works great!

Kat

The only fly in the ointment is the catalogue program kat. After installation, you have to do 'rpm -e kat' to get rid of this buggy annoyance. It is rather unfortunate that Mandriva included this program, since it simply doesn't work and will bog your machine down to the point where it will become unusable.

LCD Screen

For the notebook screen driver, I selected the generic VESA driver with a generic 70Hz monitor at 1024x768 resolution and it works perfectly.

Synaptic Touch Pad

The touchpad is by default configured with very annoying features turned on and is basically unusable after installing Mandriva. Fortunately, this is easy to fix, but if you ever rerun the mouse wizard, all your fixes will be undone, so save a copy of the configuration file.

The screen, keyboard and mouse is configured in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. There is also a Synaptic utility that can be used to configure the touch pad on the fly and it is a good way to figure out which settings you need to change. The full set of features can be displayed with:

# synclient -l

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and scroll down to the Synaptic area, then change and add the following:

Option "MaxTapMove" "0"
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
Option "MaxDoubleTapTime" "0"
Option "CircularScrolling" "1"

That will turn off the pad tap-to-click which doesn't work properly and will turn on circular scrolling. Circular scrolling allows you to scroll up/down by moving your finger around the edge of the pad: Clockwise to go down, anti-clockwise to go up, which is a good simulation of a scroll wheel.

The next problem, is that at start-up, these changes get overwritten. One way to fix this is by overwriting the xorg.conf file from a backup copy, with a command at the end of /etc/rc.local. This works, since rc.local is the last configuration file that runs before X is started. Instead of a simple backup, I use RCS, so I can keep track of versions in the etc directory.

Save all the config files in RCS (Case is important in the next set of commands):

# cd /etc/X11
# mkdir RCS
# ci -u -t-Baseline *
# rcs -U *

Now add this to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

# Fix mousepad overwrite issue
cd /etc/X11
co -f xfree.conf

The overwrite problem is caused by /usr/lib/libDrakX/Xconfig/xfree.pm, so you could also hack that file if you are comfortable with Perl.

To make these changes take effect, you have to restart X.

WiFi Adaptor

Getting any WiFi adaptor to work on Linux is basically a game of chance. The adaptors that work are documented, but the probability that you will find one of those in your local electronics stores is quite remote. Fortunately, help is at hand with two utilities that make MS Windows drivers work on Linux, by putting a compatibility layer around them. The ndiswrapper utility is supplied with Mandriva 2006 and is worth trying out. It is even integrated into the drakconnect wizard. It worked out of the box with the Dell 1350 adaptor.

If you have a special configuration, then you could make little scripts for each funny system and run them as desired:

#! /bin/bash
killall dhclient
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig wlan0 down
modprobe -r ndiswrapper
sleep 10
ndiswrapper -i yourdriver.inf
modprobe ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -m
iwconfig wlan0 key yourkey
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed essid yourssid key yourkey
ifconfig wlan0 up
sleep 1
dhclient wlan0

The above does a few important things. It unloads the ndiswrapper module, which ensures that the card is powered down, forcing a WiFi card reboot when the module is loaded again. It sets the encryption key twice, since it tends to fail the first time. It also has a couple of delays in there, to give the card a chance to compose itself. With these changes, the WiFi card should start up reliably every time you run this script.

Suspend to Disk

Suspend worked out of the box with MDV2006. Simply press Fn-Esc to make the machine go to sleep. Any key press will wake it up again.

Conexant Modem

You can buy a Conexant modem driver for $20 from Linuxant. The free download only runs at 14k4 bps. This is good to prove that it works. If you are happy with it, pay them some dough, and install a key to make it run faster. This is well worth the money.

The only problem I had, was that it broke the Suspend to disk feature, since the driver doesn't want to unload. The solution is to run 'hsfstop' before going to suspend. I simply removed the 'hsf' link from /etc/rc.d/init.d so that it won't start in the first place and then I load the modem driver manually on the odd occation that I need the modem, with 'rchsf'.

Linuxant explained that the /etc/rc.d/initd/hsf link and executing rchsf manually may not be needed. If your setup works properly, then the modem driver should load automatically as soon as you activate the PPP Dialler. The next version of the driver should also have some improvements regarding suspend.

Knoppix and NdisWrapper

NdisWrapper is a handy tool to get an obstreperous WLAN card going, using a MS Windows device driver.

Knoppix 3.9 has wizards for ndiswrapper, but running the wizards every time you boot up quickly becomes a chore. A better way is to create a script and put it on a USB dongle.

Under Knoppix, the USB dongle is /mnt/uba1. Mount it and run the joe text editor or vi or whatever takes your fancy:

# mount /mnt/uba1
# cd /mnt/uba1
# joe wup

Create a script like this, called wup. Ensure that yourssid and yourwepkey is correct, else it ain't going to work. Since this script always runs after a cold boot, we don't need to stop and unload things, so it is simpler than the script for ndiswrapper above:

#! /bin/bash
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf
modprobe ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -m
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed essid yourssid key yourwepkey
ifconfig wlan0 up
pump -i wlan0

Save it and make it executable:

# chmod 755 wup

Next time you boot Knoppix, open the USB device and run ./wup

La Voila!