My Linux Toy -- the Libretto 50CT

This is probably extremely boring unless you are trying to install Debian on a Libretto and are looking for documentation from people who have somehow managed to get it to work.

This one might be especially valuable if you don't know anything about Linux because neither do I and I managed to get it working.

I hate screwdrivers, hardware, and getting my fingers greasy.

On the other hand, if you're wondering what this is about, perhaps you should check out the links section below.

Background

I bought my Libretto second-hand -- third hand, actually -- without any floppy drive whatsoever, scarce documentation, and only American keycaps (and an American warranty, if you can call it a warranty).

After about five hours of use, the old hard drive in it died. It was still under warranty, but the Finnish Toshiba agent wouldn't touch it with a 10-meter pole. So much for worldwide warranty.

I got a new 2-gig drive (whee) and struggled for about two months (yes, two months) with it before I finally got everything running. (Don't let that scare you -- most of that was because I was busy having a merry Christmas and a happy new year. All in all, getting the thing running only took about three evenings and most of that was reading docs and waiting for installations to complete.)

The way it was done

1. Partition the hard drive on DOS with a 500-meg DOS partition, leaving the other 1.5 megs completely untouched.
2. Install Windows 95 on the DOS partition by putting the hard drive in a second computer with a CD drive, copying everything I could fit onto the hard drive, and moving the drive back.
   • The Windows CD is crammed with demos for lame warez. Don't copy that stuff unless you have a lot of hard drive to waste.
   • This moving operation took about half a dozen attempts before I got it right.
     • Make sure you get a slim model if you have to get a new hard drive for the Libretto -- older laptops would carry a similar drive but 5 mm thick whereas the Lib can obviously only accommodate a half-height drive.
     • And remember to set up the hard drive's geometry correctly in the host computer's BIOS, friends! It will look like it's trying to boot, but fails, if you have the sectors wrong when moving it back to the Libretto.
     • I got a Windows CD with the Libretto but had an old upgrade I thought I might as well use. The installation proceeded nicely until the upgrade check was done and it wanted me to insert a floppy with an old version of Windows or NT to prove that I was entitled to upgrade. Duh -- no floppy drive. Back to the drawing board.
   • I wanted the contents of the Windows CD on the hard drive for various reasons -- obviously, tweaking the Windows installation requires access to the CAB files all the time, but even if you do have access to a CD-ROM player, things are a lot more convenient if you have the files on the fixed disk all the time (on any Windows computer).
   • And anyway, you never know what kind of voodoo Windows tries to do while installing, so you really want to run the installation locally on the Libretto, not just install Windows on another computer and then move the drive back to the Libretto.
3. Move assorted other stuff I had forgotten to copy, or that I needed to get off the 'Net, over a serial link. Windows HyperTerminal sucks, but at least it has ZModem and Kermit. (I've seen more terminal programs than I care to remember that lacked either or both.)
4. Find and install the network card driver (download to the computer I had connected to over a serial line, then zip it over using HyperTerminal).
5. Finally connect the Windows side to the Internet and download the Debian package.
6. I partitioned the drive (this is part of the Debian install procedure, but it makes sense to put this note here) into a smallish root partition and a largish /usr (and of course an unused partition near the end where the Lib can save the contents of its head when it goes to sleep ... I have 32 megs of memory but I couldn't make a partition smaller than around 39.5 megs for this). This was just gleaned from one of the installation "howtos" I found on the Internet. But in retrospect this arrangement wasn't so wise; I've had to rearrange things a little bit because I managed to fill up the root partition pretty quickly; it contains /var (where dpkg puts downloaded packages -- I like to keep them around after I've installed them just in case) and /home and of course /tmp. If you're like me, one or more of those should be separate from the root partition (unless of course you go for just one partition for the whole system).
7. I gleaned the following DOS command line from a Japanese web page about installing Debian 1.x on a Libretto. I'm not altogether sure where I found it, or how (given that I don't even have the stuff to display the Japanese characters correctly, never mind that I couldn't read them if I did) but here's the command line I used to start up Loadlin the first time:

   	loadlin linux root=/dev/ram initrd=root.bin
   

   The first parameter is the full path to the kernel you want to boot; I had Loadlin, the kernel, root.bin and all the other stuff in the same directory but you might want to go for a cleaner setup. (And let's hope you will be more successful than I was at finding up-to-date documentation for Loadlin.)
8. Run the Debian installer. This was a breeze. However, something screwed up the partition table for me at one point, so I redid this part (actually all the way back to formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows ... yuck) another time.
9. You will want to install some packages before the system is actually useful for anything.
   • Using precompiled preconfigured .deb packages for things you want is vastly preferrable to configuring, installing, maintaining, upgrading etc your own versions of everything, although sometimes, the "official Debian version" of something will be some odd outdated, buggy, and esoteric version. (I mean, Emacs 20.2, Procmail 3.10 -- I thought they were kidding! This could be a feature of the installation script, though; it looks like "fresh" versions are available of most things in the "unstable" branch, which of course you use at your own peril.)
   • dselect is kind of too "user-friendly" for me, I have been using straight dpkg ever since I figured out how (and it's definitely not very hard). I wish somebody wrote an Emacs mode for this, though!
   • Besides the developer toys you need for compiling a kernel (see below), make sure you get the apmd package.
10. The default Debian kernel you installed doesn't come with APM support, so you will want to compile your own kernel. I actually ran the "out of the box" kernel for a long time before I got around to doing this myself, and put up with living without APM, but it was a real hassle. Basically, it seems that every time you put the computer to sleep, the APM routines will throw an interrupt which Linux normally doesn't know how to handle, and you get a (very meaningful) "divide by zero" panic. Until you get the APM kernel, in practice you will have to shut down Linux when you want to turn off the computer and reboot Linux when you start it up. So go build the APM kernel, you won't want to look back.
    • You will need gcc and various other "devel" packages (binutils or gas says the dpkg status entry, which also recommends libc-dev, gcc, and make ... Nothing you wouldn't want to have on your system for other reasons anyway.)
    • The kernel itself is in dists/stable/main/binary-i386/devel/kernel-source-version in the Debian package tree. There's a fairly succinct README file with all the instructions you need. You can take the .config file in the package and change the APM setting in there, or run make config to select your own devices, defaults, etc. (There's a lot of stuff in the "be-all-end-all" kernel you could leave out and not worry about. Compiling your own kernel allows you to tune the system to your needs in other ways, too.)
    • If you're running Loadlin, you will have to copy back the kernel to the Windows side. Just take the zImage file and put it where Loadlin can find it. Then you'll have to change the command line you use to run Loadlin so it will use your new kernel instead of the old one.
11. Enjoy. Repeat. Enjoy.

For what it's worth, here's the Loadlin command line I'm using now:

	loadlin zimage root=/dev/hda5

In case you've never seen this in practice, when you attempt to start this program, Windows will ask you if you are sure you want to shut down everything else and restart the computer in, well, DOS mode. If you say yes, it will sort of arrange to pull away the carpet from under its own feet after the reboot, at which point the MS-DOS program will run with full control over the computer (and in this case then load and boot Linux).

What I think I should still do is somehow create a bootable PCMCIA card for emergency situations in case I'd ever need to do this whole procedure over again. (Actually I guess I'd try to get the card to boot directly into Linux.)

Links

• Grant Taylor's Linux on the Libretto with links to more sites, but also valuable in and of itself -- definitely your first stop.
• One very helpful page, which includes e.g. a bit of documentation of what the funny Fn key does, is Ian Wilson's Red Hat page.
• I found several good bits and pieces of useful advice via the Linux on Laptops page, which has an incredibly large listing of links to pages like this one, sorted by computer make and model. (Mine isn't there, though :^)
• The Adorable Libretto page is huge, but probably pretty authoritative. I got lost in there several times, but if something's available, it's bound to be listed there. There's a U*X section with links to more pages like this one (although I generally found them to be either too newbie-oriented, or too geared towards people who had already installed a few Linux setups).
• The FreeBSD PAO page has a nice picture of a Libretto (with a Japanese keyboard -- and a Windows sticker, even though it's running FreeBSD. There are also some links if you'd like to try out FreeBSD).

In the end, the reference I relied on the most was Debian's installation instructions although I wouldn't have known e.g. how to access the BIOS of the Lib (remember, no docs with this second-hand unit) or to set up a sleep partition if I hadn't also cruised around all those Libretto sites too.