Debian GNU/Linux on the Dell Latitude LSt

Intro

Note: I have now passed my LSt on to someone else, so this information is not going to be updated any further. I'm leaving it up in case it is of use to someone as is.

This page briefly documents my experiences installing Linux on a Dell Latitude LSt. It is a nice little machine and very compact, although the 800x600 display seems a bit cramped after the 1024x768 screen I passed on to a colleague. The processor is faster and the internal disc is bigger than that machine had, though -- you win some, you lose some.

I am doing this because my experiences are slightly different from those of the author of the only other Linux + LS page I have found (via the Linux laptop pages .) His machine is an LS, not an LSt, which may be signficant -- I can't find a list of the differences.

I used the stable (potato) Debian distribution -- I have 2.2r0 on CDs and upgraded to 2.2r3 over the net once the network card was working. I have since upgraded to 3.0 (woody). Woody is still at the "testing" stage.

Partitioning the disc

Jon's LS page mentions some weird partition scheme but I found no such thing -- maybe Dell changed this. I used the DOS program FIPS (supplied with Debian) to split the single huge vfat partition into two, shrinking the original partition to 2.9GB, but leaving Windows alone on it. During the Debian install, I used cfdisk to split the remaining space into a Linux swap (256MB) and a Linux native partition (the rest.) cfdisk reported about 140MB of unused space at the beginning of the disc. I left this alone as I suspect that it is used by the standby (suspend to disc) feature -- the disc does not have a partition of the special "suspend-to-disc" type. Certainly, standby still works.

Network card

This is built in. choose the line
3c59x + 3c590 series (592/595/597) Vortex support
during the drivers part of the Debian install and off it goes.

Modem

There was a time when "WinModem" was synonymous with "Useless waste of space" for Linux users. This is no longer true if the modem is a Lucent WinModem like the one in the LSt. All you need is the source tarball ltmodem-x.xx.tar.gz for the driver, which is here. Unpack and follow the instuctions to build and install a (huge) kernel module. Then just tell pppconfig (or whatever you use to configure dialup) that your modem is on device /dev/ttyLT0

X

XFree86 3.3.6 works fine on the Neomagic video chip in the LSt using the SVGA X server. As usual with Debian, I found that the easiest way to set it up was to use XF86Setup. The built-in screen is 800x600 pixels. If you like a virtual screen bigger than the physical one, this can be done. XF86Setup doesn't know about it, but you can add the line
Virtual 1024 768
to some or all of the "Display" subsections to get this effect.

The external video port works, so you can use the machine for presentations. To make this happen it is best to uncomment the lines
Option "intern_disp"
Option "extern_disp"
in the XF86Config file. The Fn-F8 keystroke does some odd things to the screen, but does make some attempt to work. What you get on the exernal screen is exactly what is shown on the internal one. One thing the machine can do in WinDoze that I don't know how to make it do in X is to display a virtual 1024x768 on the 800x600 built-in monitor and send the full 1024x768 output to the external video port. Ideas welcome.

On upgrading to Woody, I switched to Xfree 4.1. This works too, but you now have to switch between internal and external displays with the LCD/CRT key. A bizzare interaction with the suspend-to-memory key means that this sometimes doesn't work. A sequence of suspend-resumes, switches between text console and X, and presses of the LCD/CRT key may make it work if you are lucky. I only found this out after being forced to give a presentation on Free Software using PowerPoint. Oh, the embarassment!

APM

I built my own kernel (Insn't Debian's kernel package wonderful?) with APM enabled. ( Debian's kernel images have APM turned off by default, although I suspect you can enable it with a boot-prompt argument.) Now I can see how full my battery is and can suspend to memory. The machine even turns itself off when you do a shutdown. Fn-Esc does a suspend like it says on the key and Fn-A does a standby (suspend to disc). (I needed a kind reader to point the Fn-A keystroke out to me, having spent a while assuming that standby mode didn't work!)

Sound

The machine has a Neomagic sound "card" which is part of the video hardware. There is a kernel module, nm256, for this sound hardware, but it causes the kernel to hang up if you insmod it. To fix this, you need a 1-line kernel patch, which is as follows:

*** nm256_audio.c.old   Sun Sep 30 12:26:08 2001
--- nm256_audio.c       Sun Dec 16 23:02:34 2001
***************
*** 896,902 ****
  
      /* Reset the mixer.  'Tis magic!  */
      nm256_writePort8 (card, 2, 0x6c0, 1);
-     nm256_writePort8 (card, 2, 0x6cc, 0x87);
      nm256_writePort8 (card, 2, 0x6cc, 0x80);
      nm256_writePort8 (card, 2, 0x6cc, 0x0);
  
--- 896,901 ----

Using the PC speaker for sound

An alternative way to get sound which I used before I got my hands on the above patch is to try using the PC speaker as a crude sound card. To do this, you need to get the PC speaker kernel patch and build yourself a kernel with the patch applied. To find the patch, try looking here , here, or here. The patch file willbe called something like patch-pcsp-soundcore-2.2.17 -- make sure that the version number is the exactly same as the version of the kernel you are trying to patch. Patch patch-pcsp-soundcore-2.2.18-pre16 requires kernel 2.2.18-pre16, not kernel 2.2.18, for example.

The patch seems to work on the LSt (I used kernel 2.2.18) although the sound is very poor and there is occasional odd behaviour. Still, if you are in the habit of using a combination of at and saytime to bring yourself out of deep hack mode for appointments, it is better than nothing.