Linux on the

500CDT

Installation

I'm using RedHat 4.0 as distribution. They provide you with a number of nice features such as very nice network support and their RPM (RedHat Package Manager).

The first thing you should do is a kernel compile. Make sure to include APM (Advanced Power Management) support and also network support if you have plans on networking your laptop. For networking to work, just enable the normal network support and disable the rest (pocket and portable adapters). David's PCMCIA package has everything in it and will be loaded as a module right into your running kernel, dynamically. I'm at the moment running 2.0.18 (zImage) without any problems.

X Window System

The PCI grahics is driven by a Chips&Technology 65550 chip. This isn't supported by XFree until the 3.2 revision. The tricky part is getting the correct settings in the ModeLines. The essential parts from my XF86Config are:

	ModeLine "640x480" 28.3 640 680 720 864  480 488 491 521
	ModeLine "800x600" 28.3 800 816 856 920  600 603 605 618
	

Problems?

Bandwidth
One of the biggest problems I had was when I was building the pilNet. I coudn't get NFS transfers working with higher bandwidths than around 100-150kb/s which isn't that good. Plain FTP transfers peaked at around 600kb/s but NFS never reached that high. I know NFS performance really sucks on Linux, but I never thought it would be this bad.
I solved everything by reducing the NFS buffers from 8192 (which seems to be default) down to 3072 by putting in rsize and wsize in amd.conf (I'm using the automounter).

opts=rsize=3072,wsize=3072

PCMCIA
Another big problem I had in the beginning was how to master the pcmcia services David Hinds has released. I never got the interface up and running as it did on taligent (my PPro). This was fairly easy to solve after I read the documentation. Edit the network.opts to include the correct information. Re-run /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start and of you go!.

Please note the scheme concept in this lovely package. It enables you to have your laptop connected to serveral different networks with different IP-addresses, DNS servers and mount-points. Just use the cardctl.