Experiences with severn and 2.6 kernel on a dell laptop.

Tuesday, 5 August 2003

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Hi all,

First of all, although in beta stages, Severn is a nice distribution. I like 
the laptop stuff in it (really nice).

A brief description of the hardware: Dell X200, A07 bios update, 640MB ram, 
1150 minipci wireless, firewire cdrw/dvd.

First install:
 I had SuSE previously installed on it with a brief attempt on getting RH 9.0 
prior the that. I downloaded the Severn CDs, plugged the first one in the 
firewire cdrom, and poof, stopped in "loading sbp2". so, for the lack of 
better option and time, left SuSE on. ...but lasted only one day.
 After reading more on the net (sbp2 had a hack which if loaded, removed and 
loaded again would make everything work nicely) and submitting a bug on 
redhat's bugzilla (which was linked to an internal bug in the meantime), I 
decided to try again. this time with no probing devices. poof again in the 
same spot. Subsequently I tried the *extreme method*: let the initial image 
load and remove the firewire connection while starting the installer. ..and 
voila! it worked. Of course, it wouldn't load the sbp2 module (hang again), 
but I decided I could live without for the install time. So off I went with 
the network install...

 The install worked like a charm, the system rebooted and I was pleasantly 
surprised by the graphical boot. By that time, I knew that reiser is not a 
"supported" fs and it's in a separate RPM, so I went to install it and my 
home dir could be mounted OK. A note is that I'd prefere that redhat's tool 
for viewing partitions to actually list all the mountable partitions in the 
local disk, not only the entries in fstab (especially when logged as root).

Notes on "services" 
 The sound is OK. The sound applications are not. I understand that there are 
issues with licensing various codecs (mp3), but one should be provided with 
some lines: "we don't have it, but you can get it here and compile it 
yourself". IMHO, xmms is rather useless without mp3 support since most 
windows tools rip to MP3 instead of ogg. The same story for video. 
Fortunately, these days one can get xine or mplayer and have a fully featured 
media player (I wish some would make a functional skin for xine where I could 
easily browse for files and add/dnd them...). Which leads me to the graphics: 
i830 is not what you call a gaming GPU, but it plays videos & stuff pretty 
well via SDL.
 I pleasantly was surprised vile testing a divx to find out that the CPU was 
only at 40% usage... and it's only a p3/800.

 The network: at installation level, I was really disappointed that I could 
not load the wireless to do the install (that would have been cool), but no 
one died of fatigue while plugging in a network cable (..?). After the 
install, wow! I got the wireless up & running in no time and the gnome applet 
is really cute :). So off I went with rawhide updates and what not. But about 
this, later.

 Power management: well, I'm impressed again. I managed to get the battery 
lasting more that 2 hours while configuring stuff & compiling the 2.6 kernel. 
The next test I guess would be to check a dvd/divx. Few minuses though: 
 - when I launched the battery applet (gnome), it crashed with no explanation. 
KDE would have displayed "battery/power info not available" and the crossed 
battery icon in the tray. Loaded the acpi modules, and got the applet running 
with the exclamation mark and red battery (unavailable). No big surprise here 
because I had to patch the Suse kernel with a custom DSDT.
 - acpid doesn't load anything useful (ac, battery, processor etc). One has to 
get those loaded by hand. Rather unpleasant, especially since a fix would be 
quite easy via shell...

Otherwise, the system looked quite stable (except for mc segfaulting now and 
then)

 V2. The 2.6 odyssey
 As I mentioned before, my old Suse had the acpi patch for forcing the kernel 
to load a custom DSDT table. So I tried to do the same thing to my 2.4.21 
nptl kernel. no luck. The addresses in the DSDT table I had were messed up 
(prolly because of my buils update) so I had to rebuild the table. a big 
difference from my experiences with the SuSE kernel is the raw (default) 
configuration of the kernel, fhich does not reflect at all the contents of 
the compiled RPMs. later I found out that there's a configs directory with 
custom configurations which can be loaded and subsequently altered. Also, in 
SuSE, I could just change bits in the config, do a make modules 
modules_install, and everything would be OK. big no-no in severn. The source 
rpm installes itself as 2.4.21...nptl, but the makefile has a "custom" 
appended. So, whatever you build from now on it's going to be another kernel 
altogether. I can understand it as safety feature for dummies along the lines 
"don't delete the default kernel". But one should make a note somewhere..

 As my 2.4.21 was a very frustrating experience (hundreds of warnings about 
multiple defined macros and what not) ending in errors and everyone on the 
lis was teribly excited about 2.6, I said to myself "why not?". Therefore, 
deciding to live on the bleeding edge's bleeding edge, I got arjan's 2.6 
rpms. And here is where my problems start and end...

 First, no graphical boot. Well, no big deal, in fact it's better I ran into 
it now, not after compiling a kernel. I patched the kernel with a custom dsdt 
for acpi and went to compiling the kernel. Few warnings and everything 
compiled fine. make modules_install created the "custom" set of modules, and 
make install generated the initrd and grub entry nicely. Reboot... bummer! no 
graphical boot (again). then no X/gdm. figured out that it was the mouse 
missing. so i loaded mousedev. X started, the cursor was fixed smack in the 
middle of the screen. I had a doc telling me to look in /proc on input 
devices and note the handler of the synaptics device (eventX). Found the 
device, but no handler. My first thought was: silly me, must be a param 
somewhere... after a lot of debug messages and other things in the psmouse 
module, i loaded (more by accident) the event module, and voila, the 
synaptics device had a handler. After this, the mouse works nicely (still 
have to tinker with my settings a bit). One should document that you actually 
need the event module with a ps2 mouse.

 Another thing is my wifi has to be loaded now with a "ifup eth1" (previously 
the init sequence would start it), but I can live with it

 That's how far I've got. I still have some issues: I get all the modules 
loading ok, but I can't access my firewire cdrom. Do I need some special 
config/module? Where should I look? I had a look in the kernel docs with no 
luck.. :(

 All in all, a nice, stable system (no data loss, no hard locks although the 
shutdown produces a sad system beep in 2.6 which wasn't there in 2.4).

Cheers,

Laur

- -- 
Laur Ivan                                       Tel  : +353-1-6674336
Software Design Engineer                        eMail: laur.ivan(a)corvil.com
Corvil Ltd.
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