UPDATE: - upgrading or running 5.0 - Special notes are at the end of this page- BUT READ IT ALL ANYWAY!!!
UPDATE 2: - upgrading or running 5.1 - Special notes at the end of this document... but again, READ IT ALL ANYWAY!
If you're running on a Hitachi VisionBook Plus, you should check out this webpage for the VisionBook Plus running Linux.
If you're running on a Hitachi VisionBook Pro model 7580 (not a 7560) then you should check out Tom Park's page on the Visionbook Pro 7580 There are also some reports of Visionbook Pro 7560 machines with a non-LANCE ethernet controller! Not having one of these, I can't check out what the real story is.
Here's Hitachi's webpage on the Visionbook Pro. and the Hitachi PC general home page If you already have purchased the Pro, go to the Hitachi PC website (www.hitachipc.com) and upgrade your modem to X2 56K if you haven't already. You should do this whether or not you intend to run Linux. If you do intend to run Linux, you should do the modem upgrade as step zero because the modem upgrade procedure expects to run under W95.
DISCLAIMER
Note that ALL information below is strictly on an "as is / to my knowledge/
it worked for me" basis, and is represented as being without warranty of any kind.
If you blow up your laptop, erase your PhD
thesis data, corrupt your PowerPoint presentation and lose your
job, your girlfriend, your home, your car, and your credit rating, don't come
crying to me. I hereby warn you- whatever you do, it shall lie on
your head only. I take no responsibility for any damages
that may occur.
I think the Hitachi is a very good machine; I own one and am very pleased with it. If you're thinking of buying a notebook with an eye toward Linux, I'll give you my personal "thumbs up" on the Visionbook Pro.... but you should realize that is only my personal opinion. I have been told by people who should know that the Visionbook Pro, Elite, and Plus are all very similar inside... but who knows. Like it says above, no warranty.
The Visionbook Pro is quite nice to start with, and extra nice under Linux. Audio works; suspend/resume works (even with X), the touchpad works, APM works, the screen works at 1024x768 at 8 and 16bits/pixel at 1024x768. I have it set up as a dualboot configuration so I can run twiddly little games in W95, and do Real Things in Linux. The only things I don't have working yet are having the modem talk to the speaker while dialing [this is fixed; I just had to tell the modem to talk via AT commands!], and I don't yet have the FM synth working under Linux. APM works, but I have to write a teensy little shell script to tell me that power is running low and I better prepare for hibernation, because the machine hibernates when /proc/apm shows about 10% battery capacity remaining, and it doesn't warn ahead of time.
This laptop really screams along. I rebuilt the kernel for Pentiums and I get like 340 BogoMips on the bootup, even though it's only a 166MMX. I think that's due to the large (512K, 4-way associative burst) cache in this particular 166MMX chipset. Of course, the AMD PCInet 32-bit PCI ethernet controller doesn't hurt either. :-) The C&T 65554 64-bit video with 2 megs is used as a standard (nonaccellerated) controller by XFree86 as of this writing (22-Oct-1997) so the CPU is doing a lot of work it doesn't need to.
I also have it set up so that the internal Ethernet controller or the internal 56K modem can be selected as my "network interface" with just two mouseclicks. :-)
The basics of my particular machine are as follows. Everything works both under Linux and W95 unless otherwise noted.
The swappable batteries are Duracell DR202's (if you like lithium ion batteries) or DR36's (for the nickel-hydride battery). The batteries are identical in size and shape; the swap bays have little sleds that mate the battery to the bay. Bottom line is that you can use two batteries, one battery and CD, one battery and floppy, or floppy and CD in which case you must use AC power.
If you're running on battery and you need to swap, you can close the lid (system hibernates- wait for the LED to start flashing green, then swap batteries [the LED continues to flash green while the battery is OUT! There must be one heck of a capacitor in there! ]. Then open the lid and pick up where you left off- very cute.
First of all, let me say I do NOT suggest you do this, simply because some utilities like the flash upgrade want to have a Lose95 operating system to run against.
Having said that, a classic, straightforward install of Linux (in my case RedHat 4.2) will work just fine. The pluggable CDROM is ATAPI (== IDE, for all practical purposes). You will need to be running off AC power, because you need both the floppy and the CDROM online at the same time and that leaves no space for a battery. [no, I have not tried an NFS install- if you do and it works, tell me so and I'll update this doc]
You will want to set up some configuration in Plug-and-Pray first, however. Boot W95 a few times, and verify in the Device Manager that all devices show up. Then, write down the IRQs for everything and the i/o and memory spaces for the ESS sound device and the Ethernet.
Once you have written down the stable configuration, reboot the machine and hit F2 [ == CMOS setup ] as soon as memory starts testing. You only have a very short window (maybe one second) to do it in. This drops you into CMOS setup.
In CMOS setup, you have a number of options, of which the only one I find very pertinent is to turn OFF plug-and-play OS. When Plug-and-play is turned off, the boot BIOS will use the stored values to initialize the Plug-and-Pray- capable peripherals inside. If you don't turn this off, the bios won't initialize those devices and you will probably not be able to get your Ethernet or sound working (I couldn't).
You want to go to the MAIN cmos setup, slide down to "integrated peripherals" and check to see that:
Beyond that, you have several options which you might want to set or unset. I have cover-down suspend turned on (for my own sanity!); AC mode to maximum performance, battery mode to maximum life (about two hours, more or less), and save-to-disk disabled. I don't know where save-to-disk wants to write things out, but if some enterprising adventurer out there figures it out, then let me know and I'll put it in this file.
Now, proceed with the classic Linux install, from floppy boot, then CDROM. Answer the questions as you desire (and with the data as above- I told Xconfig I had a custom monitor that could do everything including make french fries, and it works just fine). I installed XFree86 but not MetroX, as the C&T 65554 isn't supported by MetroX.
Total time for me to do this install was 43 minutes, from power-on to typing at an X shell at 1024x768x8 bits resolution. Yes, I was trying to see how fast I could do it. I told you it was a fast machine. :-)
First of all, you probably want to keep around a DOS/W95 partition if for no other reason than to run the latest shoot-em-up game. This is no problem; LILO can launch either for you on bootup.
You probably got a CDROM and a floppy (or two and two of each) with the Visionbook. Well, those work just fine to do what they claim - to restore the state of the initial partition to factory-fresh.
The catch is this: those disks are copy-protected and encrypted. The copy protection is simple- they check to see if the last cylinder of your hard disk is in a partition or not. If it's in a partition, it will NOT install. The solution- make the last partition on the hard drive end on the second-to-last cylinder, leaving the last cylinder unallocated. My machine came from the factory with W95 installed and the disk having one partition, starting at cyl0/head1/sec1, and having a _physical_ end at cyl783/head127/sec63, but a logical end at cyl784/head127/sec63. Note that the disk partition logically extends past the end of the physical partition.
Also note that this is a single gigantic partition of 3GB- which means that standard FAT won't work. Instead, it uses the W95-improved-FAT that can support big disks. Interestingly, this "support" is NOT complete, even in the W95 core. F'rinstance, look at the virgin W95 install C disk, under "properties". Note that the free space is all wrong. The upshot of this is that the factory partition not only is huge, tricky, and of typecode 0x0C, but that this type of partition is not supported by FIPS, so you can't just do a "flying repartition". You have to do a reinstall from media.
But the media you get with the Visionbook Pro say "will restore disk to original factory configuration". Scarey, eh? So how do you get from here to there?
Now, this is where the documentation tells a fib... the docs imply that your disk will be repartitioned, reformatted, and reset back to factory. This is not the case. Partition information is not destroyed, but kept! (at least for me. Your mileage may vary. Backup any data you want to keep before you do anything else.
What happens is that the boot floppy checks to see if you really wanna trash your disk; if so, it checks to see if the last cylinder is or is not allocated to a partition. If the partition is allocated, the boot floppy copy-protection wrapper concludes you aren't really allowed to run the software; the copy-protect wrapper then write-protects the C: partition (in software) and then tries to format C:, which fails and leaves you scratching your head.
If the last partition is not allocated, then the boot floppy copy-protect wrapper then finds the first partition on the hard drive and formats it. It does NOT repartition the hard drive! . You must have a partition of the correct type already in place - a DOS >=32MB partition created by Linux fdisk is perfectly acceptable. I have DOS/95 as the first partition (#1), Linux as the second partition, and it works fine.
Once the partition is reformatted, the copy-protect wrapper decrypts the W95 .CAB files and launches a typical MS install... which then proceeds to scribble on the MBR as well as completing the install of 95. But, that's OK... you can fix that with /sbin/lilo. ;-) Fortunately, the W95 partition keeps it's .CAB files around so you can reinstall W95 when it loses it's cookies.
So, the way to get a dual-boot machine is to
If so, make a second backup.
That's what I did. It worked for me. The only grossitude in the above procedure is aborting Linux after the partitioning. There's probably a neater way to do it { rescue single ? } but I was in a foul mood. :-)
The prebuilt kernel I got off the RedHat 4.2 media supports the AMD PCInet chipset as a loadable module for the ethernet, but no sound support. (the Ethernet did NOT work until I turned OFF plug-and-pray in CMOS setup). I wanted sound, so I did the kernel rebuild.
I also compiled for a Pentium rather than a 386; that improved the BogoMips rating from 245 to 350.
Things I set in the kernel rebuild:
The only real trick here is that cua0 is not the modem and thus RedHat 4.2 doesn't set the link named /dev/modem correctly. (well,for that matter, at all). [this puzzled out by Reto Lichtensteiger - thanks, Reto!]
You have to do it yourself; my modem turned up as /dev/ttyS1 (this is easy to check for yourself with Seyon. Just 'seyon -modem /dev/ttyS1' and type 'at' a few times. If you get an OK back from the modem, you have the right port. Then ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/modem and you will be all set. Use the network setup to set up your PPP link.
The BogoMips on bootup is now 327.7 BogoMips.
I know they didn't change anything on my hard drive... because I didn't send the hard drive in! I pulled everything out of the expansion bays before the machine went back to Hitachi.
[ this is lifted from the HitachiPC webpage and mangled for Linux users. ]
You can also just get into seyon and ask ATI2 and ATI3; you should get something like:
PAO2F USRobotics 56K Internal Rev 10...
M10E N10E C10E Celldriver ROM
Alas and alack, this didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. RH 5.0 as it comes off the CDROM is not as well-seasoned as 4.2 is, but it _is_ usable. Before you install it, go to the redhat site and get the full set of upgrade RPMs. Put them on your disk in a partition that will be available to you before you start the install. (this is another good reason to leave a W95 partition around. )
I also noted that my BogoMips rating went down to 247 or so. Very strange; I have no idea why this is. Maybe the FOOF bug workaround???
Hint: put the kernel upgrade RPMs in one directory, X11 upgrade RPMs in another directory, and all other RPMs in a third directory! The reason for this is so you can treat each one separately.
Install the full 5.0 distribution from CDROM. Then, upgrade the kernel to the latest-and-greatest RPM set (follow the instructions- you can't just do an 'rpm -ivh *' or you can muck yourself ! ) . The instructions basically say to
Once the kernel is installed, you can install X 3.3.2 These upgrades can be done with "rpm -ivh *" and then just restart X to get the new code running. You want to install 3.3.2 because you'll get a significant improvement in graphics speed ( 3.3.2 contains some good accellerators for the C&T 65554 display chipset ). X 3.3.2 also contains bugfixes and support for the Wacom 4x5 stylus pad, (which is a steal for $99) and although X3.3.1 claimed to support the pad, it never worked right for me under 3.3.1, but it does under 3.3.2. [note- just stealing the file "xf86Wacom.so" and putting it into a 3.3.1 install in the right place, overwriting the 3.3.1 version, IS enough to get the bugfixes.
Lastly, go to the directory that has all the other upgrades, and
install them en masse: "rpm -ivh *". You may find a couple of
RPMs have conflicts with your currently installed applications-
I had conflicts with texinfo and with Xconfigurator. Just
"rpm -e
The fix is to give X what it wants. Find the modeline that
specifies the slowest 1024x768 mode, copy the line, and change
the dotclock (the first number) from 65 or whatever to 52. Then
"startx -- -bpp 16" and it should work. (at least it does for me).
I'm running the GIMP (now at .29) and SANE. The only trick in the upgrade
was to rip out every shred of previous versions of GIMP and GTK (especially
GTK) with some very agressive "find" commands. If you leave any shreds
of GTK around, you tend to muck up the install of both GIMP and SANE. Even
leaving around an old GTK include file is enough to blow up the GIMP install.
Once I got rid of the old GTK libraries and include files, everything installed
very simply. My previous (vintage 1993, which is truly ancient history
at this point in time) PCMCIA SCSI controller (an old
old old Bus Toaster) was inadequate to operate the Umax 1200s scanner,
so I doubled my expenditure and bought an Adaptec SlimSCSI 1460B, which
works just fine.
Why upgrade? To get a bunch of bugfixes and security updates. Sure,
you can just load individual bugfixes from the RH site, but having them
all on CD is much easier. Besides, my desktop is a 5.1 desktop and having
everything at the same rev makes my little brain hurt less.
Additionally, 5.1 comes with the Wacom support built in. This means
I don't have to rebuild X just to get my artpad working. :)
The formatting of the 2 gig partition takes quite a while- you'll think
your machine has frozen or hung. It hasn't. Be patient.
RH 5.1 is much "saner" out of the box than 5.0. I installed everything
except for the HOWTOs in languages I don't understand (i.e. non-English,
non-HTMLish). Required disk space
for the install: 560 megs, not counting any user space.
Now, if you find that the battery pack won't accept a charge, that's
another matter altogether. You _can_ slow-charge it through the
contact slots (use some thin metal, like soda-pop can metal) to make a
pair of electrodes, and charge it slowly, at like half an amp at
12.5 volts, for a few hours. This will rejuvenate it reasonably
well for fifty or
so more charge-discharge cycles, but the battery will eventually
crap out again. I've found that I've been able to get about 150
more c/d cycles out of a dying pack this way (well worth it) but
eventually, they die beyond all reasonable hope of resurrection.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or additional tricks, let me know.
Back to my home
page
Kinks in 5.0:
X 3.3.2
When you install X3.3.2, you'll be annoyed to find that you
can't run 16 bpp X at full screen resolution, because the
dotclock doesn't go fast enough (or so says the SVGA server).
This is very annoying, since the dotclock _can_ go fast enough
(hey, it works under X 3.3.1, right? :) ) You'll get an error
message on the order of "fastest allowed clock is 52.125 MHz".
TkDesk
TkDesk won't run "as released" under 5.0, because TkDesk isn't
set up to use Tk8.0 (plus some other packages). The fix is to
get the statically linked RPMs of TkDesk (which are self-contained)
and use those. 1.0b5 in particular is available
as a static RPM.
GTK, GIMP, and SANE:
Upgrading to Red Hat 5.1 (Manhattan)
<14-August-1998>
This upgrade didn't go quite as smoothly as previous upgrades; among
other things, I repartitioned the entire disk structure to be:
Some sysadmins would say this is a bad idea; corruption in one partition
will nail everything. On the other hand, I've run into "no space left on
root, plenty left on /homes" before this, and since I back up my /homes
directory to another host anyway, I'm trading the devil I've been bitten
by repeatedly for a devil I've never met before. I'll let y'all know
if I am still running this way in two months, eh? If I power fail, I
will *still* need to fsck the disk, but now it's just one big partition
instead of two smaller ones.
Gotchas in the RedHat 5.1 install
Actually, 5.1 is even slicker than 5.0 . The questions are improved,
so you don't go crazy trying to figure out if it's a "PCMCIA install"
or not. The gotchas I hit were:
That should get you going with ethernet and APM.
A word on the DR202 Battery Packs
The DR202 battery pack in your hitachi says "do not short terminals!"
They mean it. If you short the terminals, you will not only blow the
teensey-weensey 7-amp internal fuse, but will also fry the internal
charge controller, with
the result that the "smart battery" goes "dumb". (the little LEDs
still light up, there's still power on the terminals, but then APM
won't turn on charging for it. Even if you replace
the fuse (as I did) the battery won't come back to life. *sigh*.