I recently purchased a Sony PCG-GRT390ZP laptop with the intention of having it dual-boot linux and Windows XP. The system I purchased has the following hardware.
| Mobile Pentium 4 M CPU at 2.4 Ghz |
| 512 MB Ram |
| 80 GB Hard drive |
| Sony CD RW CRX830E DVD/CDRW |
| 1600x1200 pixel display |
| NVIDIA GeForce Fx Go5600 Graphics Card (64MB) |
| SIS900 Based PCI 10/100 network card |
| Sigma-Tel Sound Card |
| Softx56 Data Fax Modem |
| /dev/hda1 | 5130.1 | ntfs | Sony Restore Stuff |
| /dev/hda2 | 14307.9 | ntfs | C: Windows XP |
| /dev/hda3 | 58878.6 | The rest of the disk | |
| /dev/hda5 | 58878.5 | ntfs | D: overlays the previous |
On first boot, I was asked to make a restore CD set. After burning the 10 CDs (or one DVD), I rebooted using the SONY recovery CD. The Startup CD runs for awhile, then asks for disk 1. Disk 1 comes with the option to repartition things and to delete the recovery drive. I set C: to be 15GB. By Default it then puts the rest of the disk into the D: drive, but I will go back and fix this later.
I am now ready to start installing linux. I went through several different versions of linux, all of which were quirky in some way. My preferred solution was going to be Mandrake 10, but I eventually gave up on this. What is crucial is to download the latest NVIDIA drivers from the nvidia website.
| /dev/hda1 | windows XP (un touched) | 15000 MB | ntfs | 1 | 1959 | 15735636 Blocks |
| /dev/hda2 | /boot | 100 MB | ext3 | 1960 | 1972 | 104422 Blocks |
| /dev/hda3 | / | 10000 MB | ext3 | 1973 | 3247 | 10241437 Blocks |
| /dev/hda5 | /users | 40000 MB | ext3 | 3248 | 8346 | 40957686 Blocks |
| /dev/hda6 | swap | 1000 MB | ext3 | 8347 | 8473 | 1020096 Blocks |
| /dev/hda7 | /users/msdos | 9000 MB | vfat | 8474 | 9729 | 10088788 Blocks |
The install went without a hitch. The only thing special that I did was not to have X automatically started. After the first boot, downloaded and installed the nvidia patch, and then modified the /etc/X11/XFree86 file. I then issued a startx command, and the console came up beautifully. However, the power management and the sound card did not work in this install.
I was able to start Gnome just fine, but KDE hung up on starting peripherals and I had to hard boot the system. As I really wanted a 2.6 kernel, I stopped playing at this point.
There are apparently some problems with the 2.6 kernel released with Fedora. After
a lot of research, I found a
reference
to two kernel options that need to be disabled:
CONFIG_REGPARMS = n
CONFIG_4KSTACK = n
Even with reverse patching the RedHat kernel, I could not get Nvidia to load up.
In the end, I went to kernel.org and
downloaded the source file for the 2.6.4 kernel, linux-2.6.4.tar.bz2. Installing
this kernel was straight forward. Assuming that the above bz2 file is in the directory
/usr/src, it consisted of the following steps:
bunzip2 linux-2.6.4.tar.bz2
tar xf linux-2.6.4.tar
cd linux-2.6.4
make mrproper
cp /boot/config-2.6.5-1.327 .config
make oldconfig
I just gave the default answers to all the questions. Unfortunately at this point,
I was unable to effectively use either
make xconfig
or
make menuconfig
As such, I just edited the resulting .config file and made sure that I had
the line:
CONFIG_REGPARMS = n
in the file. Note, the CONFIG_4KSTACKS is not an option in this kernel, but that is
ok. I then built the kernel:
I also modified a few other kernel options to make sure that some additional features
were working. The following three let me connect my Logitech USB camera to the
computer:
CONFIG_USB_GADGET=m
CONFIG_USB_GADGET_NET2280=y
CONFIG_USB_NET2280=m
The following put NTFS support into the kernel.
CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m
CONFIG_NTFS_RW=y
The following allows me to write to the CDRW/DVD drive:
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDESCSI=m
make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install
I then edited my /etc/grub.conf to make sure that the 2.6.4 kernel was the
default, and rebooted the system. During boot, I encountered a number of what looked
like worrisome messages, but in fact, they were not. Once you have booted, then
you can install the NVIDIA drivers,
I downloaded the file NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run and installed it
with the command:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run
Once this is done, then you need to go into the /etc/X11 directory and modify the
xorg.conf file. My version is here xorg.conf. The
crucial lines are the
comment out the line:
#Load "dri"
and the lines:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "driver (generic)"
VideoRam 65536
Option "NvAGP" "1"
# Option "NoLogo" "true"
EndSection
If you do not like the NVIDIA logo to start up, you can uncomment the NoLogo
line. At this point, you should be able to start up X:
init 5
You may get the following message, but it appears not to matter:
May 9 21:10:07 curtis kernel: nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
I also get messages both booting and shutting down about problems with the module floppy.o. Given that there is no floppy drive on this system, I am not worried, but may eventually figure out how to take care of this.
If you are happy, you can change our default login level from 3 to 5 by editing the /etc/inittab file.
I also had one oddity that occurred only once. When I rebooted the system, I came up in the original 800x600 resolution. It appears that the xorg.conf file was overwritten by the xorg.conf.backup file. After making both of these the the same new xorg.conf file, I never saw this problem again. At this point, I am happily using my system. I am not sure if everything is working, but enough is going that I am comfortable.
One potentially useful piece of information is that the hard reset button is the small hole in the bottom of the laptop next to the vent above the Windows sticker. I had one occasion to use this.
You can now clean up your kernel build by going into the kernel source directory and
doing a
cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.4
cp .config /boot/config-2.6.4
make mrproper
I boot my kernel with the following lines in my grub.conf file. Note that I
have disabled selinux at the kernel level. You may or may not want to
do this, it is not necessary, but it cuts down on complaints during
booting, shutdown and updating.
You may also want to uninstall the stock redhat stuff.
modprobe sonypi
I lost my USB mouse, and when I logged out, the system hung. I may eventually look into this more carefully, but for now I am not too worried.
09 May, 2004.