Linux on Best Okechobee

This is a summary of my experiences in getting Linux to work on my Best Okechobee.

NOTE: I used Mandrake 6.1 and I didn´t care about anything previously installed on the box - this may or may not be useful to you. You have been warned.

First of all: it is probably a good idea to write down any information you can extract from the installation that may be preinstalled on our laptop. In particular IRQs for all devices can come in handy. BIOS setting may also be useful.

Here are a few comments to what you will find in the BIOS settings (press F2 during boot):

My box has 128MB of memory, 4096 KB of video ram, a Pentium II at 400MHz and a BIOS version of 1.00.1.00 - obviously your box may be different,
Floppy is enabled - swapping with CD-ROM live works perfectly.
Primary Master: HD is an IBM-DBCA.20640 at 6485MB,
Secondary Master: CD as a TORiSAN DVD-ROM DRD-U624
Plug&Play: No - but I do not know whether it is actually of any use... I've noticed that some IRQ move around which may affect sound and/or PCMCIA IRQs, so if you have a problem, try changing this!
PS/2 Mouse: Both - using a splitter cable for external mouse+keyboard as well works perfectly.
Serial A: Com1 = IRQ4
Serial B: IrDA Com2 = IRQ3 - NOTE: I have had odd experiences here as with some PCMCIA Ethernet cards so initally you may want to disable this. IrDA may not be that important to you?
Parallel: Disabled - I do not se any use for it for now but IRQ 7 is available if need be. (but IRQ5 is not as you will see below).
Display: LCD+CRT
Panel: Expansion (currently not very useful)
TV: PAL (not tried)
Power Savings: Maximum Performance (makes sense to me)
Suspend:    Suspend
S/R Key:    Suspend
Lid action:    Suspend - seems to work,

While you are in the BIOS settings you may find it useful to set the CDs boot priority higher than the harddisk - or you will have to press F12 to override. I found that rearranging the COM-ports so that the real one is COM1 and the IR is COM2 made my life easier. It also seems that APM support works quite well so you may want to set the BIOS to suspend when the lid is closed.

Most of the installation should be straight forward, but I had two problems:

If you make room for a FAT partition (in case you want to use a Win9x DVD player) you MUST initially remove it as a booting option or lilo installation will fail - the trouble is that it requires a magic header to be installed first.
The graphics settings are confused, I´m not quite sure WHY things go wrong, but I´ve found that initially using an external monitor (only) before starting X and selecting to run in 1024x768 will work quite well, as long as you do not need to return to the text console again - it does still work, but it all jumbled up. Once it works you can safely toggle back to the internal display (using Fn F7 a few times) and disconnect you monitor again. Oh yes: I´ve used the ATI Mach64 driver and a manual monitor with VertRefresh 40-75. Remember 4096 KB video RAM as told by the BIOS - more than enough for a 32 bit display. Apart from this initial fiddle it is very stable and fast.
Fix: As the above procedure is somewhat messy for everyday use, I've been researching workaround and it seems that ATI Rage Mobility is in fact supported in XFree86 3.3.6 and later as of 10 Jan 2000 or so (about two weeks after my initial problems)! Download the suitable rpms (in my case *-4mdk*) from your closest mirror (note: I also needed to upgrade xinitrc and freetype). Install and either run XF86Setup or simply install my file as /etc/X11/XF86Config.

This should get you through the installation, but your sound wont work. As you probably found out when peeking around, the sound is based on Yamaha DS-XG (YMF744 PCI) who are not really helping OpenSource out much. I´ve fiddled with the legacy soundblaster support, but it claims that the resource is unavailable - my current theory is that this is because it shares IRQ 5 with the Gfx card, but that is not a problem as they are on different buses - a bug in the soundblaster code I guess. However, the OSS demo driver works perfectly so the easy way out is to spend $30 on that...

Apart from that things seem to run just fine, floppy and APM work as expected as does PCMCIA with any card I´ve tried - even the brand new 3com XJACK once I upgraded to the 22 dec 1999 driver pack on SourceForge. Docking the Battery Monitor is a good idea and I´ve set the Laptop Power Control to go into standby after 5 minutes idle when not powered. The system suspends properly when the batteries are nearly running out. Even "shutdown --h" manages to turn the power off properly.

Things I intend to examine: using IrDA. I´ll probably also try to turn off tap-ing on the touchpad - it is a but annoying in my humble opinion... I'll also try to get more detailed information about the LCD screen to get other modes than 1024x768 working.

Hope this will help you out!

Here are a few dumps from my system in case you are interested:

/proc/devices

Character devices: 1 mem 2 pty 3 ttyp 4 ttyS 5 cua 7 vcs 10 misc 14 OSS 36 netlink 119 vmnet 128 ptm 136 pts 254 pcmcia

Block devices: 1 ramdisk 2 fd 3 ide0 9 md 22 ide1

/proc/interrupts

           CPU0
  0:    1024331         XT-PIC  timer
  1:      16395         XT-PIC  keyboard
  2:          0         XT-PIC  cascade
  3:      10237         XT-PIC  3c589_cs
  5:          0         XT-PIC  Yamaha DS-XG
  8:          1         XT-PIC  rtc
  9:          1         XT-PIC  MPU-401 UART
 12:      83820         XT-PIC  PS/2 Mouse
 13:          1         XT-PIC  fpu
 14:     600910         XT-PIC  ide0
 15:          4         XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0

/proc/modules

ymf724                23276   1
audiobuf              10824   1 [ymf724]
opl3                  13800   1 [ymf724]
uart401                6804   1 [ymf724]
midi                  27988   1 [opl3 uart401]
ac97                   4616   1 [ymf724]
soundbase            482924   1 [ymf724 audiobuf opl3 uart401 midi ac97]
sndshield              5068   0 [ymf724 audiobuf opl3 uart401 midi ac97 soundbase]
vmnet                 11616   3
vmmon                 14368   0 (unused)
3c589_cs               8296   1
ds                     6056   1 [3c589_cs]
i82365                28808   1
pcmcia_core           51904   0 [3c589_cs ds i82365]
nls_iso8859-1          2052   1 (autoclean)
nls_cp437              3580   1 (autoclean)
vfat                  11036   1 (autoclean)
fat                   32960   1 (autoclean) [vfat]

/proc/pci

PCI devices found:
  Bus  0, device   0, function  0:
    Host bridge: Intel Unknown device (rev 3).
      Vendor id=8086. Device id=7190.
      Medium devsel.  Master Capable. Latency=64.
      Prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xf8000000 [0xf8000008].
  Bus  0, device   1, function  0:
    PCI bridge: Intel Unknown device (rev 3).
      Vendor id=8086. Device id=7191.
      Medium devsel.  Master Capable. Latency=128.  Min Gnt=140.
  Bus  0, device   7, function  0:
    Bridge: Intel 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 2).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  Master Capable.  No bursts.
  Bus  0, device   7, function  1:
    IDE interface: Intel 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 1).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  Master Capable.  Latency=64.
      I/O at 0x1050 [0x1051].
  Bus  0, device   7, function  2:
    USB Controller: Intel 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 1).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  Master Capable.  Latency=64.
      I/O at 0x1060 [0x1061].    
  Bus  0, device   7, function  3:
    Bridge: Intel 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 2).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.
  Bus  0, device   9, function  0:
    Multimedia audio controller: Unknown vendor Unknown device (rev 2).
      Vendor id=1073. Device id=10.
      Medium devsel.  IRQ 5.  Master Capable.  Latency=64.  Min Gnt=5.Max Lat=25.
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xfc000000 [0xfc000000].
      I/O at 0x10c0 [0x10c1].
      I/O at 0x1080 [0x1081].
  Bus  0, device  12, function  0:
    CardBus bridge: Ricoh Unknown device (rev 0).
      Vendor id=1180. Device id=475.
      Medium devsel.  Master Capable. Latency=168.  Min Gnt=128. Max Lat=4.
  Bus  0, device  13, function  0:
    Communication controller: Unknown vendor Unknown device (rev 1).
      Vendor id=127a. Device id=2015.
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  Master Capable.  Latency=64.
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xfc010000 [0xfc010000].
      I/O at 0x1088 [0x1089].
  Bus  1, device   0, function  0:
    VGA compatible controller: ATI Unknown device (rev 100).
      Vendor id=1002. Device id=4c4d.
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  IRQ 5.  Master Capable.  Latency=66.  Min Gnt=8.
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xfd000000 [0xfd000000].
      I/O at 0x2000 [0x2001].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xfc100000 [0xfc100000].