Toshiba NB100 upgrade from OpenSuSE 11.2 to 11.4

Ok, I have a bit of spare time in between DMSTech and LibDevConX^2 so I decided to upgrade my NB100 to OpenSuSE 11.4 using the downloaded iso image on my Zalman ZM-VE200. Having copied the important data onto the Zalman, I select the OpenSuSE image and reboot.

The laptop boots from the image perfectly, possibly slight faster than from actual DVD drive and I select the Update option when it is presented. The I go with defaults except that I don't let it delete all my added package repositories like Packman and VideoLAN since it's easier to go in afterwards and simply change 11.2 in the path to 11.4 instead of adding them anew. There is one dependency issue which I resolve by not installing the offending item and then it's time to go and get a coffee while installation proceeds.

And that's pretty much it - the install went through without a hitch and it seems pretty much all my settings etc. have transferred correctly.

Elisa, OpenSuSE fun

Not really U810 specific but there are a few wrinkles to getting elisa working on OpenSuSE 11.0 with the packman packages. The elisa chaps seem to have got the bit between their teeth so this is for 0.5.2 - which may well be superceded and fixed by the time you read this. Anyway, installing the packages with yast results in a non-working situation so the following needs to be done...

• Install IPython - not vital, but helpful for debugging since you can bring up a python shell inside elisa and poke around a bit
• Install python-cssutils since it seems to have dropped out of the dependencies
• You can purge twisted and go back to the yast-installed version since it now seems to be happy with latest version
• Insert a __init__.py file into /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa and /use/lib/python2.5/site-packages/elisa/plugins. This file can be hauled out of the source code in the tar file on the elisa download page.

Once this is done all works OK though it does seem to struggle on the U810 and will lock up some times on heavy activity. In these respects the 0.3.5 release was better - but there is a lot of work under way so we shall see.

OpenSuSE 11.0

OK, I was going to wait for OpenSuSE 11.1 but I weakened and am putting 11.0 on now. :)

First surprise - the touchscreen works during install - albeit with a slight scaling issue, possibly because the install runs in 800x600 stretched mode but very promising.

11.0 will help as the code I found for the keyboard lights is for a later kernel than 10.3 stock. If I'm going have to do a kernel recompile (which I haven't needed to do since 1998 with Slackware!) I might as well go for a new OS install (which will almost certainly take less time than a kernel rebuild on the U810). It will also clean up the cruft from various experiments...

• Banshee - whose existence in a market with Amarok et al already there seems a bit of a mystery. Plus it requires an unbelievable amount of Gnome bits to work.
• The gstreamer dependency mess between OpenOffice and Elisa

Now the fun and games begin...

• Wired networking fails to work unless you add the following boot parameters to /boot/grub/menu.lst
• pnpbios=off pnpacpi=off
• The autodetected touchscreen settings seem to be uncalibrate-able so the evtouch installation needs to be done. However, the build for OpenSuSE 11.0 has the calibration parameters in out.txt mixed up - they should be renamed as follows: x0/y0 -> x6/y6, 1 -> 7, 2-> 8, 6 -> 0, 7 -> 1, 8 -> 2
• Display brightness works out of the box although the keyboard buttons only move it up/down one notch (other programmatic changes work fine)
• Suspend to/from disk works fine
• Package management is a LOT faster which makes fiddling a whole lot more fun.
• Installation detects the Atheros wireless and inserts the ath5k module but it doesn't appear to work. The madwifi repsoitory doesn't contain a correct package for the kernel I'm running (latest patch) so I need to compile it. Ho hum, now the download link for source doesn't work from the OpenSuSE Atheros page - what I want is the latest trunk version and all is well.
• Elisa is now upset by the new version of python and/or it's libraries (damn!)
  

U810 Touchscreen

As martschie on the UMPC portal Forums has pointed out, the Touchscreen only misbehaves when AC power is plugged in. In battery mode it works fine - guess that means it's meant to be mobile.

Now a dilemma - do I carry on hacking away at OpenSuSE 10.3 or risk going to 11.0? Having had some issues with the *.0 releases for 8,9 and 10, I think I'll wait for 11.1. It sounds like some of the Lifebook U drivers may well be merged into mainline by then.

Random Installation Thought

It occurs to me that the OpenSuSE Windows-based installer would probably have let me install from SD or CF if I had just copied all the files fro the ISO image on the card ... and I had a card big enough. Something to try for later....

Atheros hacking

Now I have Linux on, I will be downloading stuff and patching stuff so I want some connectivity. Wired ethernet works OK on my U810 with OpenSuSE 10.3 - some people have reported acpi issues but I have it enabled with no problems. However, this is a mobile device so I want to get wireless working.

I got the U810 in the USA and the Atheros WiFi chipset therefore has brain damaged firmware that restricts you to channels 1-11 for 802.11b/g. This is, of course, completely stupid for a device designed for mobility so it needs to be fixed but it appears that firmware updates are not exactly thick on the ground.

A bit of trawl takes me to Tamosoft who have something called CommView for WiFi which, if I was using Windows, seems to be quite a nice WiFi monitoring/analysing app. along with some other network tools. However, there is also an Atheros firmware adjuster mentioned on this page. You'll need to download the CommView for WFi trial to run it but it works. So now I have channels 1-13 (or 14 if you select a Japanese locale).

So there was a reason I kept that Vista partition about...

Now to get the Linux Atheros drivers, which aren't included in OpenSuSE because of licence conflict issues with Atheros' binary-only HAL. The madwifi guys are working on the problem but in the meantime, the OpenSuSE site has these instructions which do the trick.

The madwifi one-click-install also adds the OpenSuSE online repository to the software repository list. This contains all the stuff on the DVD and more so, now I have it in, I go into Yast and disable the DVD as a software source - that way, if I download anything that needs the DVD it will go to the online repository instead which is fine now I have WiFi working.

Getting OpenSuSE on the U810

First things first, we have to clear some space on the HDD. I'm not ready to kill Vista entirely yet since I might need to use the Device Manager to look at settings etc. So I fire up the Disk Management module and delete the redundant 1GB D: partition which exists for no obvious reason. I'm leaving the 1.5GB hidden "EISA Configuration" partition for now (what a quaint anachronism!) as they often contain useful "recovery-type-stuff" but I can't be bothered to look at the moment.

I resize the Vista partition to give us some space...and it won't shrink smaller than 24GB even though there's "only" 10GB of stuff on it (for a "basic" Vista Business install!). Hmm, WTF - okay let's do a disk cleanup and a defrag and see if that improves anything...nope! OK, what else have we got that clogs up the filesystem?

Shadow copies & Restore points, that's what. Switch them off and I can resize away to give me 18GB for Vista, 18GB for OpenSuse and 1.5GB for EISA which makes 40 HDD-sales-GB. So three basically tiny restore points (I hadn't messed with Vista much) clogged 14GB of filesystem - nice.

The U810 doesn't come with an optical drive but I have a rather useful USB to IDE cable from Maplin which did the trick (not an enclosure which you have to mess about with, just a cable with a Molex) along with a random spare DVD drive I had lying around.

Drop in the OpenSuSE 10.3 DVD (32-bit for the A110 processor) and fire up the installer from inside Vista. This patches the MBR on the disk and starts the installer on reboot after which it's the standard OpenSuSE install. Next time you reboot into Windows it tries to uninstall itself (how very tidy and polite!) but Windows blocks it since I'm in "Protected Admin" mode which offers no real protection and a whole lot of irritation so I have to run it manually.

I've installed the standard desktop configuration...now the fun begins.

New Lifebook U810

Okay, I have my Lifebook U810 and very nice it is too except that...

• Vista takes an age to start with a lot of screen flickering and drive churning
  
• ...which means you use hibernate/standby a lot
• ...which means being nagged constantly as it seems to need a lot of patching
  
• ...and Explorer and Media player both crashed within the first 12 hours of use
• ...it's just plain annoying to use with too many clicks to do anything useful

So, it's time to put Linux on and since it's Novell certified (yeah, right) that means I'll try and use OpenSuse and will doc the process here - for my benefit when I rebuild on an SSD more than anything.