Linux on a Gateway Solo 5300

This page is no longer maintained (and hasn't been for a while). I am not going to keep this page online for long. The information here as well as the provided files are in the public domain, anyone can feel free to copy the data and maintain the page himself if appropriate.

This page documents a successful installation of RedHat Linux 7.1 on a Gateway Solo 5300 (depicted above)

Disclaimer: This page is of informational purpose only, and I deny any responsibility on eventual damage to your hardware caused by the instructions herein. Note that most open-source software like the one referenced from this page is provided ``as is'', without any warranty.

Note: I don't really recall how far back this page dates from, probably spring 2001, but in any case it is growing quite old by now. I don't use this machine anymore, and the info here is obviously not maintained. This page will be kept here as long as my account here remains active.

Hardware specifications

General instructions

Minor tweaks

System info for my machine

Useful links

• Screen: 14.1" XGA Color Display (1024x768)
• Processor: Intel Celeron Processor 600MHz
• Memory: 64MB SDRAM
• Video: S3 Savage IX-MV 2X AGP, 8MB SGRAM
• Sound: ESS Maestro3(i)hw sound card
• Mouse: Synaptics Touchpad
• PCMCIA: Cardbus controller, 2 Type II PCMCIA slots
• External ports: VGA, ECP Parallel, Serial, 1xUSB, NTSC/PAL Video Out, Power Input, 240-pin Docking Connector
• Battery: 8-cell Lithium Ion battery and AC pack
• Hard Drive: 10.0GB Ultra ATA Removable hard drive
• Floppy Drive: Modular 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive
• CD-ROM or DVD: Modular 24X CD-ROM drive
• Fax/Modem: Integrated Lucent 56K (Win)Modem (Good news: works w/ linux!!)
• Dimensions: 12.25"W x 9.98"D x 1.38"H, approx. weight 5.5lb.

A few comments on these specs. The screen is really cute. I only have a single bad pixel, and it's so tiny that one can barely see it.

The video card is perfectly supported by XFree86 4.0.3 (ships with RedHat 7.1), but this seems to be pretty recent stuff. XFree 86 4.0.1 (which ships with RedHat 7.0) doesn't support this board, for instance.

I didn't manage to make the touchpad understand a middle-button click with a two-digit press on the pad. So therefore it must be regarded as a 2-button pointing device, not 3 (you enable the middle button with XFree's Emulate3Buttons option). I didn't try the scroll feature (the right area of the pad is supposed to be somewhat special, and interpret moves as if they were done on a scrolling wheel).

The PCMCIA bridge appears to work (although I did no real thorough testing, I only have one 16bit network card).

You can get around 3 hours out of the battery. APM works without an itch

The Floppy Disk Drive and CD-Rom drive can be exchanged. There is a W$ utility to switch them while the computer is runnig. Not the kind of game I'd play with linux (IDE is not really known to be hot-plug). As a side note, please be sure to *completely* insert the CD-Rom drive in the bay when exchanging the devices, since you can end up with a half-inserted bay without really noticing it, until it disconnects for some reason. Update on this (20040218): http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~ania/gateway5300/ has some info on hot-plug, it might be worthwhile to check out.

The WinModem works flawlessly with linux.

The BIOS includes a feature known as ``save to disk''. I don't see any interest in this stupid thing, so I don't use it. If you plan to, look on the WWW for instructions on how to configure it correctly. More precisely, you need to reserve a part of your hard drive for this function (as much as your physical RAM, I guess).

There is an optional LAN adapter, my laptop doesn't have one

• Create space (1): First, you need to make room out of your W$ partition. To do this, you should use FIPS. Boot W$. Copy the ``dosutils'' directory from your RH CD-Rom #1 to your hard disk. Then defragment your hard disk (you can reach the defragment program by right clicking on the C: icon in the ``my computer'' folder, then select ``tools'', and ``defragment''). This program is a real pain in the ass. If you choose to view details, you will have the opportunity to look at him doing his job, moving files to the end of the drive and back to their original location again (apparently the software doesn't skip useless moves). As a result, even a perfectly unfragmented disk can take you 1 hour to defragment. If you want, you can try first without the defragmentation step, firing ups fips first, and defragment only if FIPS fails to obtain enough space.
• Create space (2): It's time to run FIPS. Exchange your CD-Rom drive (you do not need to remove the CD from the drive) and Floppy Disk Drive (using the ``bay manager''), and insert a blank floppy disk in your drive. Switch to DOS mode, go to C:\DOSUTILS\FIPS20, and run FIPS.EXE. Answer ``yes'' when the program asks you whether you are interested by a backup of your root and boot sectors (it is mandatory if you want to wipe up linux from your Hard disk afterwards). This should be a bootable floppy if you intend to have a standalone recovery solution, but you can probably get along with storing the generated ROOTBOOT.000 file to your hard drive. It is very unlikely that you end up with an unbootable system anyway, and even though, you can always boot from a CD-Rom. If all works well, you will have to choose a split size. The figure on the right is the size of your newly created partition.
• How much space do you need ?: I believe that 2GB is a minimum for a comfortable installation. 3GB is of course even more comfortable. The installation I did used approximately 1.5GB, most for /usr. If you want to make many partitions, you can adopt the following scheme
  • / : 120M, or less if you want, but change the inode-per-block parameter then, since RH stupidly takes ~15000 entries in /dev (wow!)
  • /var : 200M, and make a symlink from /tmp to /var/tmp
  • /usr : 1.6GB.
  • SWAP : 128MB.
  • /home : the rest.
  In short, add up all these figures, and make enough room.
• Start the installation: Shut down the computer, remove the floppy drive, and replace it by the CD-Rom drive (again, make sure it's completely inserted). Then start the box again. Make sure that your computer boots the CD-Rom before the hard drive (hit F2 at system startup, then you can reach the boot device priority menu somewhere under ``boot''). Boot from the CD. At the syslinux prompt, hit the enter key. More or less, all I will say about the installatino is ``click OK''. So here are some hints:
  • Keyboard : Select ``Generic 104 (or 105, if appropriate)-key keyboard''
  • Mouse : Select ``2-button auxiliary device (PS/2)'', and ``Emulate 3rd button''
  • Partitioning : Select your partitioning scheme, and partition accordingly. /dev/hda1 is your original W$ partition, containing your W$ data. You should delete the /dev/hda2 partition created by FIPS, and make an extended partition instead. Then build your partitions inside this one. Don't worry if your bootable partition is above the 1024-cylinder limit, the BIOS copes with that
  • Package selection : I can't help you with that... Oh just one thing: while the packages are being installed, go get a coffee. It does take a while.
  • XWindows configuration : No problem here. Choose 1024x768 as the resolution, since this is the resolution of your TFT screen (as long as you have the same as mine). The screen frequency probe seems to fail, but the fallback frequencies are reasonable (maybe a little bit conservative). I forgot to look at the doc if it says anything about it (it might). If you do have a look at the doc, then supply the advertised values instead.
  • LILO : Install LILO on the Master Boot Record (/dev/hda).
  • Boot disk : Nah, you don't need one. Don't fear, the BIOS *will* boot your kernel. Anyway, your Floppy Disk Drive is not in the laptop at the moment.

A few more or less minor but neat things to add:

• The sound card is (mysteriously) not detected. Edit the file /etc/modules.conf, add an ``alias sound-slot-0 maestro3'' line, run depmod -A, and you're all set.
• The modem is a WinModem, and won't work without some work (really nothing difficult). You should grab the ltmodem package. I used version 5.99a4. You can find it either from the ltmodem home page or from my local copy. Untar the file (in /tmp for instance), and execute the ./build_rpm script. You end up with a ltmodem-<something>.i386.rpm that you can finally install. Your modem will be on /dev/ttyLT00, so go make a symlink from /dev/modem to ttyLT00. That's all (I won't do your dialup configuration for you...)
• Graphic mode right at kernel boot can be obtained by putting a ``vga=791'' line under the ``label=linux'' line in your /etc/lilo.conf. Do this, then restart /sbin/lilo. You've won a cute penguin logo.
• Missing packages. Glimpse through the list of files on the 2 CDs, and look if there are some uninstalled packages you might be interested in. Among the packages that contain Great Software (TM) and are not installed by default, you have vim-enhanced, vim-X11, zsh, gnuplot, fvwm2*. Of course, my point of view is kinda biased :-)
• Internationalized messages. It seems that the file /etc/profile.d/lang.sh does not take into account your language choices during the installation. So if you want gdm for instance greet you in your favourite language, update this file.

• The dmesg output
• The output of cat /proc/pci
• The output of cat /proc/interrupts
• The output of cat /proc/ioports
• The output of lsmod
• The log of an XFree86 run
• My lilo.conf file
• My modules.conf file
• The output of /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda
• The output of /sbin/sfdisk -l -uS /dev/hda
• My FIPS recovery file (don't use if you're not 200% sure you have the same setup as me!).

I no longer have the machine with me, so basically that's all. I know that the XF86Config file is missing, sorry.

• ltmodem home page
• Gateway's web site
• Linux on laptops
• My e-mail address: thome at lix dot polytechnique dot fr.
• My web page, although it is probably not useful.

Original URL of this page: "> http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr