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Linux on a Sony C1VN Picturebook |
The Picturebook is still one of the coolest gadgets around, but as a notebook, by today's
standards it is severely underpowered.
Installing Linux on it makes sense, because by tailoring the operating system to
the it the its capabilities you can still make the machine a pleasure to use.
For maximum control, I decided to go with
Gentoo with which I had no previous experience.
THis way the whole boot-up process takes less than a minute.
The following are a couple of useful things I found out on the way, by no means a step-by step giude.
Installation
If you want to install from the PCMCIA CD-ROM, boot with
gentoo ide2=0x180,0x386 docache
Once the bare bones system on the CD has loaded, my wireless card worked immediately
after saying
modprobe orinoco_cs
cardmgr -f
iwconfig eth0
ifconfig
You won't be able to see the CD any more, though. That's why the docache flag was important.
In general, the
Gentoo Handbook
is an excellent guide through the long list of tedious steps.
I suggest one important departure from the Handbook. Do NOT say
emerge --sync . If you do, you might not be able to
install binaries from the accompanying packages CD, because portage
will have it in its head that newer packages are available and
insist on downloading them and compiling them from scratch.
Use emerge -K to install packages from binaries.
Kernel Configuration
There are far too many options to list here. Use common sense.
Don't forget to enable Crusoe support, sonypi
and everything you need for your PCMCIA wireless or network card.
X windows
If you are lucky, you can install xorg-X11 binaries. If you are not, like me,
emerge will download the files from the net and compile everything, which
takes more than 3 hours.
You need to put
ModeLine "1024x480" 65.00 1024 1032 1176 1344 480 488 494 563 -hsync -vsync
in the monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf and correspondingly add "1024x480"
everywhere in the display section.
FVWM2
FVWM2 is still my favorite window manager,
because it's so simple and is so easy to configure.
It's becoming more and more difficult to get it to work with the various modern
distros.
FVWM is particularly well suited to the Picturebook because it is so lean and so fast.
emerge -k fvwm installed it straight off the bat (only 25 minutes of compilation
this time).
Simply put fvwm in ~/.xinitrc to tell
X to use it instead of its default.
Further packages to install
- Wireless:
wireless-tools
- LaTeX:
tetex
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