Red Hat Linux 7.1 on a Dell Latitude L400

These pages are dedicated to my experiences setting up a Latitude L400 to dual boot between Windows 98 SE and Red Hat 7.1. I chose Red Hat because I had heard several reports that version 7.1 `just works' on this hardware, and also because I have some experience of installing versions 5.2, 6.0, and 6.2 in the past. I would agree that there is a very good case for Debian to be considered a much superior distribution, but my limited experience is that it's rather more difficult to set up, one needs to select `unstable' if one is to get recent versions of OS software, and also commercial software tends to be tailor-made for Red Hat. There's a separate page detailing why I chose this machine .

The hardware is reported to be identical to the Dell Inspiron 2100 (Dell acknowledge this), which is unavailable in the UK. There is already a page reporting a trouble free installation of Red Hat 7.1 on that machine. My motives for writing these pages are (i) to provide a link that is explicitly about the Latitude L400, for the benefit of anyone who is not aware of its Inspiron clone (ii) to document the fact that it also works with Windows 98 SE and FIPS, rather than WinME and Partition Magic and (iii) my installation was not entirely trouble free, and I would have been grateful for a page such as this one.

I should add that I am far from being an expert on Linux, and I'm a complete novice when it comes to DOS and Windows. This site is aimed at the reader with some Linux knowledge and experience. I would suggest that anyone about to perform an installation should in the first instance read the Red Hat installation manual from cover to cover.

The hardware

My L400 has the following specs: The machine was delivered with the whole disk in one FAT32 partition, Windows 98 SE installed and apparently fully functional, though I didn't check whether APM was working - more on this later. My installation was over NFS - the University of Cambridge very thoughtfully provides exported volumes with mirrors of several Linux and BSD distributions.
top

Summary

What I think I should have done

  1. Boot in DOS mode; use PHDISK.exe to remove the hidden SAVE2DISK.bin file; defrag the hard drive  (probably not really necessary for a brand new disk, but a good idea all the same)
  2. Prepare a bootable DOS floppy with FIPS; split the  FAT32 partition in two; reboot into Windows98 and run Scandisk to make sure the Windows partition is OK
  3. Boot from a floppy containing Red Hat's bootnet.img; partition the non-Windows part of the disk, reserving 262MB for later conversion to a Save-To-Disk partition
  4. Install Linux over NFS
  5. Use fdisk and lphdisk (both under Linux) to prepare the save-to-disk partition.
top

What I actually did

  1. Boot in DOS mode; defrag the hard drive
  2. Prepare a bootable DOS floppy with FIPS; split the  FAT32 partition in two; reboot into Windows98 and run Scandisk to make sure the Windows partition (now 2GB) is OK
  3. Boot from a floppy containing Red Hat's bootnet.img; partition the non-Windows part of the disk for Linux
  4. Install Linux over NFS
  5. Discover that neither Windows nor Linux is capable of saving to disk, even if I remove and re-create the Save-to-disk file in C:
  6. Use Phdisk to delete the Save-to-disk file; go through 1.-2. again, this time shaving 262 MB off the Windows partition; reboot to Linux and use fdisk and lphdisk to convert the new partition to a save-to-disk partition. Save-to-disk now works in Linux, though still not in Windows.
top

Details

Splitting the FAT32 partition

This was by far the scariest part of the installation. I used FIPS, a free DOS program that ships with Red Hat; others swear by Partition Magic (which costs money), and the Gnu parted is probably up to the job too. The program comes with warnings about unbootable disks and the like, so it's worth taking this part of the installation seriously, slowly, and in a sober state.

After defragging C:, I prepared what I thought would be a DOS bootable floppy by 'format a:/s' from a DOS prompt in Windows, and copied the necessary files to this floppy (as described in the FIPS documentation). I booted from this floppy (it booted to some kind of DOS mode, though `Windows 98' was printed on the screen). and followed the instructions, resizing the partitions (2GB to Windows). The program appeared to complete successfully, but then printed `Memory allocation error - COMMAND not found' and halted. Nevertheless, on rebooting to Windows 98 the partition seemed to have been successfully split; SCANDISK reported no errors on the shrunken C drive. The rest of the drive was now an unformatted DOS partition.
top
 

Installation of Linux

This was a breeze. All the hardware was correctly detected, including the ethernet card (which is lucky, as I needed to use it for the installation) and the video card; I also discovered that the sound card was auto-configured too, though the installation process didn't think to mention this fact. When I think back to Red Hat 5.2, where X and sound had to be configured after installation...

One of the first things in the installation is the partitioning of the disk. I first had to delete the extra DOS partition created by FIPS. I managed to end up with one primary Linux partition for `/', and an extended partition containing two ext2 partitions and swap; I don't have any particular advice on how you should partition your disks, though it's nice to have `/home' as a separate partition in case you reinstall.
There are two points at which I chose to deviate from the defaults offered to me:

  1. I chose `ALPS Glidepoint' rather than `Generic PS/2 mouse', because that was suggested by the author of the Inspiron 2100 webpage . I doubt this makes any difference; I later changed back to `PS/2 mouse' in X, and noticed no change. I now have now connected an external Genius wheelmouse, so I've changed it again.
  2. The installation suggests putting LILO on the Master Boot Record of the disk. Do not do this! I have done this with a laptop in the past, and the result was that, after performing a save-to-disk, the machine would return to the LILO prompt when switched back on, rather than automatically resuming where it left off. The best advice is to put LILO at the start of your `/' partition, making sure that this partition is marked as `active' so that the boot process looks there after looking at the MBR. It may be that this doesn't matter if the save-to-disk partition is initialized after installing Linux, but I wouldn't take the risk if I were you.

    3. Incidentally, although I'd swear that I marked my / partition as active in Disk Druid, on rebooting I was thrown straight into windows, so it was lucky I elected to make a boot diskette and was able to get back into Linux to fix this.
    top

Preparing the save-to-disk partition

Advanced Power Management allows for saving the computer's state to the hard disk, so that when one switches the machine on again the machine reverts to exactly the same state. This requires a special place to be set aside on the hard disk, usually prepared by a DOS program called PHDISK (for machines equipped with the Phoenix NoteBIOS), either as a file on a DOS partition or as a separate dedicated partition. The machine came with a ready-prepared save-to-disk file. However, as I mentioned before, after installing Linux I discovered that save-to-disk didn't work in either Windows or Linux; in both cases, nothing happened when pressing the hotkey combination. I don't know whether it was working in Windows before the Linux installation. Deleting and re-creating this file (using PHDISK, of course) made no difference.

Fortunately, I was able to recover Save-to-disk by creating a new save-to-disk partition. Rather than use the DOS program PHDISK, which is rumoured to be buggy and hungry for your data (though it's worked for me before), I chose to use a native Linux program called lphdisk . This program only formats the partition and updates the BIOS - you have to create a partition of type a0 (`IBM Thinkpad Hibernation') using your favourite fdisk-like program first. The recommended size for the partition is (system RAM) + (Video card RAM)+2MB, or in my case 256+4+2=262 MB; both PHDISK and lphdisk recommended this value. I can report that this worked fine for me, and that save-to-disk now works under Linux, though not Windows.
top

After installation

There are a few things worth doing post-installation to improve the usability and security of your system
  1. Immediately update all packages in accordance with Red Hat security advisories . This is especially important if your machine has a permanent connection to the internet. Go through the list, check to see if it applies to you (rpm -q for each package), and if necessary download and install (rpm -Uvh) the patched versions. It's possible to automate this, if you're so inclined.
  2. Close down all network ports that you don't need. Gone are the days when Red Hat installed by default with wide-open telnet and ftp servers, but I still found myself with sendmail running unbidden. Run `netstat -tap' (as root) to see what ports are open and what programs they belong to. To stop sendmail, for instance, run `/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail stop', and to stop it starting up each time you boot run `chkconfig  --level 2345 sendmail off'.
  3. To get nice, scalable, TrueType [tm]  fonts, you can copy them from your windows installation (if appropriate) or you can download them (legally) from Microsoft . Put them in /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType/, then cd to that directory and run `ttmkfontdir -o fonts.scale; mkfontdir'. They should appear when you restart or rehash the xfs font server (or reboot).
top
 

The good news...

...is that almost everything really does `just work', without any extra effort on the part of the human. Whichever external IDE drive is connected to the machine at boot time is automatically recognized, and I even get the appropriate icon (Zip or CD) on my KDE desktop. It's a little confused: the floppy icon never goes away, whether the drive is attached or not (the same is true under Windows, by the way), but all in all it's a real tribute to Red Hat's hard work at making Linux user-friendly.
top
 

The bad news...

...is that not everything is perfect:

Touchpad driver

There's nothing actually wrong about the way the touchpad driver works, but it's a little short on features. With my old laptop, running Red Hat 6.2 + XFree86 4.0.3 installed from the binary tarballs at the XFree website , I get multi-finger taps: tap with one finger=left mouse button, tap with two fingers=middle button, tap with three fingers=right button. This is very neat. I didn't have to do any additional configuration to get this - I just specified `generic PS/2 mouse'.

Unfortunately, these gestures don't work with  the new machine. I don't know whether it's an issue with the driver, the hardware, or whether I can recover it with some clever configuring. I'd be grateful for any hints on this one.

Update 13/10/01:  The problem isn't restricted to X - the console mouse service gpm is also incapable of configuring the touchpad as a 3-button mouse (unlike on my old machine). The Synaptics webpage has some technical documentation that states that more recent touchpads don't work in 3-button mode (apparently because `in practice this was never used'!) so I have come to the conclusion that this is a hardware limitation that I will never be able to overcome.  So much for progress!

top

External monitor

I have an external 15" Samsung LCD monitor connected to the port replicator, and X refuses to start up when the laptop's own screen is deactivated (either in the BIOS, using hot keys, or by shutting the lid). There is no problem when both internal and external screens are activated - indeed, I can start X with both screens working, then deactivate the internal screen, and the external screen works.

I'm positive that I've specified the correct refresh and sync rates (straight out of the manual), and I know that both card and monitor support compatible VESA modes, but X complains that all the modes are out of the refresh or sync rates of the monitor. I'm not sure whether this is a problem with the video card/driver, the configuration, or the monitor.

Update 13/10/01: Well, Duh! it turns out that I was only editing XF86Config, whereas my version of X uses XF86Config-4.  This rather explains why I wasn't seeing any  difference when I edited the file.
top
 

Advanced Power Management: problems resuming from suspend

Although I had problems getting suspend-to-disk to work, suspend to RAM (activated by fn-esc) worked out of the box for the first time. However, on resuming the ethernet connection turned out not to be working. Fixing this is simply a matter of 'rmmod 3c59x; insmod 3c59x' after the fact. However, I've had a couple of hangs when resuming, one of which was a genuine kernel `oops'; since I automated the `rmmod 3c59x' by putting it in /etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/apmcontinue, I haven't had anymore hangs, but I haven't yet got a working script to automate bringing back the network.

Things also weren't plain sailing when I got save-to-disk partition working. The first time resumed from this, I got `hda: lost interrupt' messages on the console, followed by a system hang. Having seen this on other systems, and also having heard from another user with the same problem, I knew the solution was to disable DMA before suspending. This can be done by uncommenting the HDPARM_AT_SUSPEND and HDPARM_AT_RESUME variable assignments in /etc/sysconfig/apmd; the former sets the disk to very conservative settings, and the latter chooses higher-performance ones that seem to be within the capability of the disk.

Incidentally, save-to-disk seems extremely slow. It takes over 2 minutes for 256MB to write to disk, compared with about 15 secs. for my old 64 MB laptop - i.e., the new laptop is about twice as slow as the old.

As I mentioned above, no APM functions work at all under Windows 98. I'm waiting for Dell support to get back to me on that one. Update 13/10/01: eight days later I'm still waiting for a response from Dell (who `aim to respond within 48 hours'). Contrast this with Netraverse, who got back to me within the hour when I had an installation problem with Win4Lin.
top
 

Minor niggles

top
 

Irritations with Red Hat 7.1

Apart from issues related to my hardware, I've also found that Red Hat 7.1 isn't entirely bug-free. When I installed Windowmaker, I didn't get any of my applications appearing in its menus; when I installed AfterStep, I got no way of switching to it (in Red Hat 6.X this was an option from within Windowmaker). This is the sort of thing that should work automatically. Scilab (from the Powertools collection) crashes without giving an error message when I try to use graphics. Mouseconfig consistently tells me that it can't read /etc/sysconfig/mouse (it complains about file permissions, though these look OK to me), even though this file was created by mouseconfig itself.
top
 

Conclusions

This is by far the smoothest Linux installation (out of 7) I have done. I was extremely impressed by the successful autodetection of all my hardware, and by the distribution as a whole. I would have no hesitation recommending this laptop for anyone who wants to use Linux. However, there are a few things which one has to go under the hood a bit to fix.
top

Last modified 13 Oct 2001 by Stephen Cornell