A running Debian with xfce - the picture is not very good, though.
This document is intended to describe some of the problems and solutions I find when installing Debian on my biblo. The machine is old but its still one one the smallest around and this makes it a nice extremly light-weight laptop.
Other resources. Some other people have written nice documents which I used during the installation. Read these, too (some are also copied locally just in case the originals disappear).
A running Debian with xfce - the picture is not very good, though.
The Biblo comes with a floppy, but someone poured tequila on mine. It also comes with an optional CD-drive, but it doesn't boot from it. The problem is how to bootstrap the machine. Once a kernel is running it can be configured to install using the PCMCIA network card, but how to get the initial kernel running?
Fortunately we have Loadlin, which can start linux from a dos prompt (the machine comes with Win98 pre-installed...)
Alright, problem solved. First dowload loadlin.exe. Then compile a kernel with ramdisk support (not as a module) and initial ramdisk (aka. initrd) support. Rememer to include drivers for your network card, pcmcia and other stuff you need. Then comes the tricky part, create a small linux installation into a ramdisk that the newly compiled kernel can load it. My Biblo has 96 Mb memory, but a ramdisk larger than 30 Mb crashed the system. I don't know what limitations there are on the ramdisk size (other than that it must fit into RAM, of course), but once I got the installation squeezed to 28 Mb it started booting. In case you want to test download my ramdisk and kernel (config) and start it by typing in a dosprompt (it will ask you to create a .pif file, but that's OK)
c:\> loadlin.exe bzimage initrd=ramdisk.gz ramdisk_size=28000 root=/dev/ram roNote that I forgot to empty the root password, but you'll get it from me if you need.
Now I hade a working Debian installation. Using this I partitioned hard disks (and finally created a swap device!) and copied over the ramdisk contents to the new disk partition. Then I installed the pcmcia packages by downloading them from Windows. After a few reboots between operating systems I could finally install the rest with apt.
dmesg
says
sb: Init: Starting Probe... sb: Probing legacy card with io=220, irq=5, dma=1, dma16=-1 SB 3.01 detected OK (220) ESS chip ES1879 detected sb: Init: DoneNote that to the card is not plug-and-play, so at least I had to say
options sb irq=5 io=0x220 dma=1in
/etc/modutils/local and once I ran kernel 2.6 in
/etc/modprobe.d/local.
I couldn't get pcmcia to work as a module, I don't know why. With kernel
2.6 it seemed I also needed to option
CardBus yenta-compatible bridge support, but I'm not sure this
is true.
Then I installed the pcmcia-cs package and it just worked.
My network card Belkin F5D5020 Fast Ethernet 10/100 Mbps uses
the pcnet-driver (aka. NE2000 compatible PCMCIA support in the
kernel configuration).
I had some problems with XFree 4.1 but once I upgraded to 4.2 it started working. The neomagic driver works nicely. The config file is here. I also installed xfce as window manager it is fast! I definitely recommend it. With firefox as browser I have a nicely working installation of only 300 Mb!
The BIOS apparently supports FIR since Windows seems to be able to use it, but noone seems to know the chipset. Setting IR tp IrDA in BIOS gets IR running and since I use it for GPRS access, the IR speed is not my concern. I installed the debian ir-packages (conf) and the ir port seems to be set at (from dmesg):
ttyS3 at I/O 0x2e8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
I nice command for pinging the phone (or whatever device you have on the IR port) is:
cat /proc/net/irda/discovery | grep saddr | cut -d, -f4 | cut -d: -f2 | xargs irdaping
Alright, IR installed, now lets rock and roll! Configuring GPRS for Linux proved a bit more tricky than I had expected, but it does work.
When I tried connecting to my Ericsson T68i mobile phone, I
had to do the following for it to even connect
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/irda/max_tx_window echo 2000 > /proc/sys/net/irda/max_tx_data_size
Phone connected, nice. Then I installed the Debian ppp packages (and compiled a new kernel because I had forgot to add ppp support) and tried to run the scripts I found and after removing the lines it says to remove for a Ericsson phone -- it worked.