Linux on the BTO 15V125+ Extreme
After working with second-hand and mostly third-hand hardware, and yet another death among my machines, i decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to buy a brand new laptop, and get rid of all the old crap except for the new server, Seraph, which still isn’t live yet.
After a friend came up with BTO Notebooks, an N4ALL company, i got interested and after some deep research the BTO 15V215+ Extreme is mine. Running Linux offourse!
Index
Lets make this thing easier to refer to..
Device Information
Since the Gentoo 2008.0_beta1 was far from ready and needed an x86_64 (x86_32 only supports up to 3GB of memory) bootable with support for the most recent hardware, i used grml64_0.2. Saved the output of the lspci, lsmod and dmesg commands to be able to configure the kernel correctly before the first reboot.
Net-don’t-work
Whatever bootable i used, the network card (Intel PRO/1000, e1000 module) kept giving the following error instead of coming up (problem described on thinkwiki.org)..
e1000: 0000:02:00.0: e1000_probe: The EEPROM Checksum Is Not Valid
e1000: probe of 0000:02:00.0 failed with error -5
None of the tricks worked, and couldn’t patch a bootable’s kernel off course. It took me 5 hours to come up with a solution which was so logical that i actually gave myself a hit in the head: download the latest driver from Intel. Here is the howto, and a direct download.
After you loaded the module once, there’s no need to do that anymore, seems the interface settles itself and accepts the standard kernel e1000 module after that too.
Gentoo 2008.0_beta1
Time to boot up the Gentoo 2008.0_beta1, holding the bugs for that release next to the laptop so i knew what i could expect to run into. And i was lucky, cause except for the missing keymaps selection, none other came up.
Multilib or not?
During the installation i had to decide whether to go for the multilib profile which installs both x86_32 and x86_64 bit stuff so you can run 32bit applications, or the no-multilib profile which is x86_64 only.
The amd64 arch (which you should use, since ia64 is a whole other architecture) wasn’t far behind on the x86 arch, and knowing the problems i’d run into (like no Adobe Flash support), i chose the no-multilib anyway.
Dirty Sandbox
After the first reboot i wanted to recompile the system with the -march=nocona -O2 -pipe CFLAGS (-march=core2 supported from gcc 4.3), and my USE selection (see the make.conf later on in the document), and ran into the sandbox problem error: cannot run C compiled programs. The FEATURES=-sandbox emerge --oneshot sandbox didn’t help, i was missing the following configuration in the kernel config as described here.
CONFIG_IA32_EMULATION=y
CONFIG_IA32_AOUT=y
ALSA & Intel HDA
Sound worked with a grml64_0.2 bootable, didn’t work in my installed system yet. See the bug report i commented on. Does now ;)
SATA & SCSI
Lazy now, will continue later.
Comments
← Windows XP op 3-disk Stripe Using rxvt-unicode in client/daemon mode →