 | Debian on GericomThis is a brief description how I installed Debian Linux 2.2 (potato) on a Gericom Supersonic 1000MHz notebook with a DVD/CDRW drive. It helps a lot if you have some experience with Debian and compiled your own kernel before. This is not a newbie guide. If you have problems with it, don't hesitate to mail me. First I installed the base system without any extra packages. You only need the first CD for this. You might as well select some tasks, to have less downloads later, or if you want to have a richer system to start with. I had a 3Com PCMCIA network card (Model 3CCFE574BT) plugged in. It was automatically detected and the setup asked me for the network settings like IP, DNS and gateway. Connected to a gateway with fast internet access I installed everything from now on via the net. To do this you need to activate the online sources in /etc/apt/sources.list. Then run an apt-get update and an apt-get dist-upgrade as well as apt-get install emacs19 and similar for any other package you need. You can specify more than one package at once. To get all the hardware working you need the 2.4 kernel. This requires some not so offical packages. Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://people.debian.org/~bunk/debian potato main and do another apt-get dist-upgrade. Then download the latest kernel sources from ftp.kernel.org (I used 2.4.7), unpack them and start the configuration. Load my settings and tweak them further as you wish. Some important options you shouldn't remove are:General Setup: Advanced Power Management (to monitor the battery power)IDE: no CDROM support but SCSI emulation andSCSI: CDROM and generic support (for the CD writer to work)Console drivers: Framebuffer VESA mode (for a nice textmode with a penguin logo)Sound: VIA 82C686USB: UHCI If everything compiled OK, add an para for the new kernel in /etc/lilo.conf. To try the nice textmode also set the option vga=ask there. Don't forget to lilo -v afterwards. If you have the CD writer you might as well already add the option append="restart=warm hdc=ide-scsi". Reboot with the new kernel. When asked for a textmode enter 0317. If this works you can change the above option to vga=791 to bring it up automtically. These numbers describe the same textmode, one decimal the other hexadecimal. Now while textmode is nice we still want X. You could use the framebuffer driver, but this is slow. You better switch to XFree 4. Again we need some unofficial packages, the apt sources are: deb http://people.debian.org/~cpbotha/ xf403_potato/i386/ deb http://people.debian.org/~cpbotha/ xf403_potato/all/ Now install the following packages: xbase-clients xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base xfonts-scalable xfree86-common xfs xserver-common xserver-svga xserver-xfree86 xspecs xterm xutils and put my XF86Config-4 into /etc/X11. There are three different mice definitions. The built in touchpad, an external PS/2 wheel mouse which I use and an external USB wheel mouse. Only the built in mouse is activated. Cross fingers and start X. Man, was I happy when this finally worked. I tried XFree 4.1.0 first, but that did not work well with most window managers. For the sound enter the following lines in /etc/modutils/aliases: alias char-major-14 ac97_codec alias sound ac97_codec post-install ac97_codec modprobe "-k" via82cxxx_audio and run update-modules. A nice program to adjust the rather low sound level at startup is aumix. For the CD writer do the same with these lines: alias scd0 sr_mod pre-install sg /sbin/modprobe ide-scsi pre-install sr_mod /sbin/modprobe ide-scsi pre-install ide-scsi /sbin/modprobe cdrom You also need to change the symbolic link for the drive to /dev/cdrom -> sr0. For the modem you need the ltmodem driver that comes with a neat compile and install script. There are also prebuild debian packages for recent kernel versions. I didn't get it working with my provider yet though, but the physical connect seems to work. Try the wvdial package to set up a connection. I don't really need USB, but I tried a mouse and it worked. The modules are already compiled, add these aliases like you did for sound alias usb hid pre-install hid /sbin/modprobe mousedev pre-install mousedev /sbin/modprobe usb-uhci You also need to create the device node: mkdir /dev/input mknod /dev/input/mice c 13 63 To activate the USB device filesystem, add this to /etc/fstab: none /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0 Read the USB Howto for more details or other devices. In lack of any devices, I didn't try IrDA yet, anyone? Hope this helps anyone, took me some days to figure it all out. Please mail me if you find this useful or have any questions and especially if I mixed some things up, I wrote this a while after I actually did it. |
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