In the following paragraphs I will be describing my experiences from installing gentoo 1.1a on my laptop. An iso image of gentoo 1.1a (stage 1, ~16MB) was downloaded from their homepage. Remember to get the ix86-version. If anyone has got specific questions, please don't hesitate to mail me at lars@delicate.se. With my high capacity (3100mAh) battery, my current configuration lasts me about 2.5 hours for somewhat heavy usage. I take no responsibility for what will happen with you or your computer if you follow these directions.
This is how I set up my BIOS. Enter it by pressing ESC when you see the SONY logo, followed quickly by F2, after which you can read that you are entering the BIOS at the bottom of the screen. Beware that if you set things so that "degradation" will happen in an unnatural way, it might cause your computer to crash.
| SECTION | SETTING | VALUE | COMMENT |
| Main | BIOS Version | R0109R5 | If anyone knows where to find BIOS updates for this computer, please let me know. |
| Main | Total Memory | 64MB | |
| Main | Video Memory | 2MB | |
| Advanced | Memory Cache | Enabled | |
| Advanced | Plug & Play O/S | No | Linux is no toy |
| Internal Modem | Modem Configuration | Enabled | |
| Internal Modem | Base I/O Address | 2F8 | |
| Internal Modem | Interrupt | IRQ 3 | |
| IrDA | IR Base I/O Address | 3E8 | |
| IrDA | Interrupt | IRQ 10 | |
| IrDA | Mode | FIR | |
| IrDA | DMA Channel | DMA 0 | |
| IrDA | FIR Base I/O Address | 140 | |
| Serial Port | Serial Port Configuration | Enabled | |
| Serial Port | Base I/O Address | 3F8 | |
| Serial Port | Interrupt | IRQ 4 | |
| Parallel Port | Parallel Port Configuration | Enabled | |
| Parallel Port | Mode | ECP | |
| Parallel Port | Base I/O Address | 378 | |
| Parallel Port | Interrupt | IRQ 7 | |
| Parallel Port | DMA Channel | DMA 3 | |
| Audio | Sound | Enabled | This is a ES1688 integrated card |
| Audio | Base I/O Address | 220 - 22F | |
| Audio | Primary DMA Channel | DMA 1 | |
| Audio | Secondary DMA Channel | DMA 5 | |
| Audio | Interrupt | IRQ 5 | |
| Audio | MPU I/O Address | 330 - 331 | Seems to be the standard address |
| Audio | Speaker Volume | 2 | Imagine booting in a library |
| Power | CPU Speed | Full | I believed that auto was good, however, when I tried to watch a movie in X (using mplayer) the framerate would increase dramatically when I was moving the mouse at the same time. I figured that this had something to do with this setting and indeed it had. After I set it back to Full everything runs faster, all the time. |
| Power | Idle Timeout | Off | I decided to turn all these options off and just suspend the machine (Fn-Esc) if I intend to leave it for a while |
| Power | Suspend Timeout | Off | Picking only one kind of timeout seems to be a good idea |
| Power | Hibernation Timeout | Off | Never hibernate, waste of disk space and takes too long to recover from |
| Power | Lid Close Action | Suspend | I never close the lid unless I am leaving with my laptop or it is off already |
| Power | Hibernation on Low Battery | Off | Never hibernate |
| Power | LCD Brightness | 9 | A must, unless you always lurk in the dark |
| Power | LCD Brightness Down Timeout | 30 Seconds | Enough time to lean back and reflect on something |
| Power | Video Suspend Timeout | 2 Minutes | Shut down LCD 2 minutes later |
| Power | Spindle Down Timeout | 2 Minutes | It's so quiet when the hard disk stops making noise |
| Power | Sleep Timeout | Off | If I leave the laptop for more than 2 minutes I'll suspend it instead |
| Power | Timer Reload by HDD Access | Off | Kept interrupting idle mode when on |
| Power | Timer Reload by IRQ | Off | Didn't even try to use this |
| Power | Resume on Modem Ring | Off | Nobody will call me |
| Power | Resume on Time | Off | Use the laptop as an alarm clock? |
To save some time when I did a second installtion on another laptop I went ahead
and downloaded a stage3 tarball instead. You can boot without kernel options and
switch to your pcmcia network card once you have a prompt. To download the
tarball use:
"wget http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/releases/build/1.1a/stage3-i686-1.1a.tbz2"
and substitute for the stage and platform you want.
There's no real easy route through the installation with this distribution. It's source based and you will want to choose to compile every package that you install so that you will gain optimal performance for your system. Burn the iso image and boot from that cd. When the boot: prompt appears type "rescue ide2=0x180, 0x386" and press enter, so that the kernel will find your CD. After booting, skip to the section about setting up your partitions in the installation guide. I chose a 100MB ext2 /boot partition as recommended, which seems a bit too large so I'd say 40MB is enough, 128MB swap and the rest for the ext3 root (/) filesystem. Once they and the CD are mounted copy the stage-file (or files, if you downloaded another stage distribution) to /mnt/gentoo. Go back to the section where you load the PCMCIA-kernel modules, and try to get cardmgr up and running. This didn't work for me and I got some errors when I tried to switch the CD for my 3c574-TX network adapter. Do not panic! Just reboot and press enter at the boot: prompt this time. Now you can safely remove your CD and insert another pcmcia-card before loading the kernel modules. However, remember to mount your partitions and turn on swap again, before you continue with unpacking your stage-file.
Note that they have recently changed the rsync mirror, so if you get an error when you try to emerge something, do "export SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-ix86-portage" before trying again. It is also important that you select the correct architecture options in make.conf, which in this case would be the i586 section (uncomment).
emerge rsync - 15 min
bootstrap - 8 hours (ouch)
emerge system - 5 hours
My system booted without errors only when I did not add my network card to the /etc/modules.autoload. Neither did I add net.eth0 to a runlevel using the rc-update script. What I did do, instead, was to "emerge pcmcia-cs" after the kernel had been built, and then do a "rc-update add pcmcia default".
UPDATE: Entering the BIOS and fiddling with the power settings followed by exiting and saving fixed my Fn-keys.
A ton of kernel options to configure. You can see all the options that I selected in my .config. I tried to use the sonypio support, both in the kernel and compiled as a module, but neither worked and I think it managed to render my Fn-keys unusable. Avoid and see if you still get Fn-key functionality. At least the kernel didn't take too long (30 min) to compile with my settings. Stay away from ACPI, I tried it and it produced a kernel error message every few seconds. APM works fine, even though my Fn-keys don't I can suspend the laptop using "apm -s". Looks like it's safe to run apmd again too. You can add it as a service by first doing "emerge apmd" followed by "rc-update add apmd default". You also need to emerge apmd to get the apm command.
Time to emerge a desktop environment. This time around I wanted to go slimmer than I did with Mandrake. Enlightenment seems to be a good choice of window manager still, but I went for fluxbox this time. Try "emerge --pretend fluxbox" and you'll see that you will need a lot less packages than if you want to "emerge --pretend enlightenment". I'm not sure how long it took to emerge fluxbox (with x11-base/xfree) since I fell asleep. It did not take longer than 8 hours though. This is what my desktop looks like now:
This is all I run now, fluxbox with the Shade theme and the bbpager (emerge bbpager) for easy handling of the virtual desktops. Note also that the green line on the left side of the screen is not a bug. It is a program showing the the battery status and if you look carefully you can see that mine is almost full. The screenshot does not do it justice, it shines brighter in real life. The xbattbar is unfortunately yet not in the portage tree, so you have to download and install it yourself. Now, you probably want to have some things start up every time you start X, but fluxbox does not support execution of programs at startup. You will have to do this the old fashioned way with xtoolwait (emerge xtoolwait) through your .xinitrc. If you are curious about the prompt and getting your xterm to show your login information, which is useful if you ssh or telnet to another machine you could set some options in your .bashrc.
To get sound, make sure that you compiled sound support as a module and that you compiled the OSS/SB16 support with it. Add the following to your /etc/modules.autoload. Optionally you can add the OPL3 module for playing midi-files (which I haven't tested).
sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330
opl3 io=0x338
If you'd like to mount your shared windows folders you will have to "emerge samba" since smbmount is part of that package, as well as saying yes to SMB support in the kernel. Unfortunately samba is a large package and it takes ages to emerge. Lots of work for a single command. To mount type:
smbmount //computer_name/share_name /mnt/net -o username=AdministratorThis of course assumes that you have a /mnt/net directory and that you know the Administrator password on your Windows machine.
UPDATE: Battery time is indeed improved.
UPDATE: xmms won't play divx (xvinfo tells you what the problem is).
UPDATE: To remove an installed package use "emerge unmerge <package>".
Emerging mozilla took a great deal of time and once I got it up and running it was slow. I'm not sure if it is a CPU hog or if I'm having too little memory in the VAIO. Currently running with 64MB built-in and 128MB swap. First impressions of battery life is that it is improved. Should be, since fluxbox is light and the new kernel should behave more efficiently. Note that I also chose a darker theme, hoping that this will have the screen using less voltage. There's no unnecessary junk running on the desktop either, like I had FancyLauncher and gkrellm in Mandrake. When I get xmms installed (currently building qt, which takes forever) I will start to do some more extensive testing. I normally run xemacs, latex, and xdvi while listening to mp3:s. Under that kind of (rather heavy) use my Mandrake setup would die after about an hour and a half.
I am not sure why this happened, but my laptop had a few problems with the Mandrake setup I used earlier. It would sometimes decide to not wake up after a suspend, as if the keyboard was dead. All that was left to do was to hold the power slider until the machine was shut off and then switch it back on. This was fine, since it happened so rarely and I was in the habit of saving everything before suspending. However, running fsck every now and then when booting did suck some extra juice from the battery, so it was a bit annoying at times.
One day my laptop decided to not respond to the power slider either after one of these hickups. It was plain dead and there was nothing I could do to get it back up and running it seemed. I tried removing all power (battery + ac) but it didn't help. I didn't really know what to do but I found a small hole on the bottom of the laptop, so I thought it was some kind of CMOS reset button. Pressing it didn't have any effect, so I decided to dismantle the laptop. Turns out I didn't have to though. Looks like pressing the button when power is connected helped, and not like I did first, with nothing connected. Anyway, should the laptop lock up completely for some reason, try the "invisible" button.