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Laptop Athena Linux

by Bill Cattey

Last Modified: $Date: 2004/09/07 22:11:38 $

Latest News

7 September 2004: Update to reflect historical nature of these pages. Also did a conversion to new IS&T style.

Overview

This page was intended to provide up-to-the-minute information on the support status for Athena Linux on laptops. The primary focus was on Recommended Notebooks for Students. Unfortunately, after the IBM R32 and T30 were discontinued, the wireless and power management of the new offerings from IBM, Dell, and HP quit working under Linux. Fully operational laptops are promised in the future. When they show themselves as working, this page will undergo a massive rewrite to document current hardware and software configuratins.

One sentence synopsis: Nothing yet compares to what IBM shipped in 2002. Maybe some day.

Come here to find out:

lore of installing Athena on laptops.
which of the IS recommended systems have been tested and known working.
news of hardware revisions to the recommended systems that results in a change between something that does and does not work.
status on using Athena on a laptop when disconnected from the network.

Currently Tested Systems

IBM Thinkpad R32: Fully supported. Athena install, Sound, Wireles, Screen blank, and Suspend/Resume tested and working.
IBM Thinkpad T30: Fully supported. Athena install, Sound, Wireless, and Suspend/Resume tested and working.
Dell Latitude C610: Not Recommended: Hardware discontinued. Wireless needs to be disabled before Athena install works. Suspend/Resume does not work.
Dell Latitude C640:Not Recommended: Wireless needs to be disabled before Athena install works. Suspend/Resume does not work.
Dell Latitude C840: Athena NOT supported. Custom X server required. Suspend/Resume does not work.

All Systems

It is strongly recommended that you do a custom install, and preserve the vendor pre-installed software. This requires use of Partition Magic to shrink the NTFS partition containing Windows. The Athena installer can create appropriately sized partitions to hold Athena for you, or you can use Partition Magic to create them.

If you choose to use Partition Magic, create an extended partition to hold 3 partitions of the following sizes and types:

    type        size          use
    Linux Swap  512M          Linux Swap Partition
    Linux       128M          AFS Cache
    Linux       3G (or more)  Linux Root filesystem ("/")

Warning: Although performing a custom install is the default, you should remember that a non-custom install erases your hard drive, and creates all new partitions for single-boot Linux Athena only system.

After your disk is partitioned, if there are other partitions on the disk, the Athena install will prompt you asking if you wish to boot any of those partitions. The Athena install REPLACES the boot loader that came with your computer with Red Hat grub. When the install completes, a copy of your old master boot record is saved in /boot/grub/old-MBR.

IBM Thinkpad R32

WORKING!

Fully supported. Athena install, Sound, Wireless, Screen Blank, and Suspend/Resume tested and working.

Hibernate works under Windows, but we don't yet know how to set it up for Linux. The resume behavior is a little non-obvious.

For wizard-level lore on working with this system see, IBM Laptop Lore.

IBM Thinkpad T30

WORKING!

Fully Supported. Athena install, Sound, Wireles, and Suspend/Resume tested and working.

Screen blank works fine on the low-resolution version of the T30, but has a PROBLEM on the high resolution T30 with the SXGA+ video.

Warning: By default, the T30 will turn off the LCD screen after 5 minutes of idle time. On only SXGA+ (high resolution) systems, when you hit a key or move the mouse, the screen does NOT come back on. The screen WILL come back on if you suspend and resume (by closing and opening the laptop, or by using the Fn-F4 key sequence.)

On SXGA+ systems it is recommended that you disable the "LCD off timer" in the BIOS. Detailed instructions on how to do so are contained in the LCD Off section of IBM Laptop Lore.

Hibernate works under Windows, but we don't yet know how to set it up for Linux. The resume behavior is a little non-obvious.

Apparently the mouse support gets confused by the two left buttons, and two right buttons and single middle button. Emulate3Buttons works with this hardware, but the middle button does not. So to paste into a terminal emulator window, or to make other use of the middle button, press both the left and right buttons at the same time.

If this does not work for you, it is because the automatic mouse configuration got confused, and you need to enable the feature by hand by editing the file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:
Change:

        Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "off"

to:

        Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "on"

For wizard-level lore on working with this system see, IBM Laptop Lore.

Dell Latitude C610

Warning: Linux Athena is not Recommended for this configuration.

This particular configuration has been discontinued by Dell. The Wireless card must be disabled before the Athena install will work (unless you don't mind waiting an hour for the bits to get copied in over the slower wireless link in preference to a fast hard wired link.) Suspend/Resume does not work.

Note: in contrast to so many laptops, recovery from screen blanking DOES work for this machine.

Before attempting to install, go into the BIOS and Disable the MiniPCI Wireless network card. This change requires you to power-cycle the machine before it will take effect. If you do not disable the wireless card here, the Red Hat install will find the Wireless card before it finds the wired ethernet and will take much longer to perform the install because it will be pumping the bits through the slower wireless line.

Sound works (until suspend).

Warning: SUSPEND DOES NOT WORK! DISABLE IT! If you use the suspend command, sound quits working, and the network, either wired or wireless goes offline and never comes back.

It seems that the 4 mouse buttons that this system comes with confuses the automatic X configuration. It turns off 3 button emulation. In order to be able to get the middle mouse button functionality, hand edit the file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:
Change:

        Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "off"

to:

        Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "on"

For wizard-level lore on working with this system see, Dell Laptop Lore.

Dell Latitude C640

Linux Athena is not Recommended for this configuration.

This particular configuration superceds the Dell Latitude 610. The Wireless card must be disabled before the Athena install will work (unless you don't mind waiting an hour for the bits to get copied in over the slower wireless link in preference to a fast hard wired link.) Suspend/Resume does not work. Screen blanking does not work.

Sound works (until suspend).

Warning: SUSPEND DOES NOT WORK! DISABLE IT! If you use the suspend command, sound quits working, and the network, either wired or wireless goes offline and never comes back.

Warning: DISABLE Screen blanking in the BIOS! Although the display resolution is a pleasant 1400x1050, the X server gets hopelessly confused and displays GARBAGE as soon as the BIOS power management system runs and blanks the screen.

        Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "off"

to:

        Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "on"

For wizard-level lore on working with this system see, Dell Laptop Lore.

Dell Latitude C840

Warning: Athena NOT supported.

There are two known variations on this platform. The older one comes with the NVIDIA GeForce 2 Go video chipset. The newer one comes with the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Go video chipset. These two chipsets are not supported in the version of X that ships with Red Hat Linux. This laptop will not work with stock Red Hat Linux and will not work with Athena. It may work if you fetch a driver from the NVIDIA web site, or check out XFree86 server sources from the CVS tree and build your own X server.

Switching Between Wired and Wireless

Up to now, Athena has been supported only on desktop systems, and those only had hard-wired network connection. Athena has heretofore never installed the network configuration tools to make it easy to switch between multiple networks. At the present time, Athena only thinks in terms of one network interface.

Installing an easy to use tool to switch is on the TODO list. Watch this space for an announcement of such a tool. Until then, you need to be a bit of a Linux Guru to get wireless working.

For the IBM R32 and T30 systems, the current procedure is documented in the Switching section of IBM Laptop Lore.

For the Dell systems, the current procedure is documented Switching section of Dell Laptop Lore.

Disconnected Operation

Disconnected operation sort of works, but you have to be patient while some services try and use the network and take way too long to time out. You must create for yourself a "local account" that will not try to use any network services such as authentication, and that will not keep your home directory in AFS.

Before trying to use Athena Linux on your Laptop when disconnected from the network, follow the instructions in the Private Athena Workstation Owner's Guide (PWOG) for Creating Local Accounts for Athena Users.

To tell Athena not to use network services, you must create a proper entry in the file /etc/athena/access. Continuing the example from the PWOG, if your user name was cmonster, you need to have the line:

cmonster lL

in the file. The lower case l means that you've enabled that account to log in from the X server. The capital L means use only local capabilities for the account. (The file is not created by default by the Athena install, so for the first entry, you will create a new file.)

At the present moment, if you power up Athena with no network connection, or resume from suspend with no network connection, you'll get a blank screen. Wait 45 seconds. It's the X server doing a name query. It will time out, and then you can log into a local account.

More graceful support of switching between connected and disconnected operation is under active development. Watch this space for updates.

Issues

Get the IBM T30 with high resolution graphics SXGA+ graphics to do screen blanking properly (probably requires an obscure X bug fix.)
Get the mouse configuration tools to do a better job at finding the middle mouse button.
Athena needs a convenient tool for switching between Wired and Wireless connection.
When XFree86 4.3 comes out, see if the Dell 840 works.

Change Log

8 January 2003: Removed warning about partition distruction because the newly released install does the right thing at last. Also explicitly mentioned Dell C610's screen blanking does work.

11 October 2002: Warning about maintenance partition.

8 October 2002: New Athena installer deployed that gets auto-partitioning happy.

24 September 2002: More extensive testing of IBM systems. Tested SXGA+ IBM T30. Described work arounds for non-ideal behavior. Spun out separate pages for detailed procedures and lore for the two platforms.

19 September 2002: Tested Dell Latitude C640. Install works. X works, but screen blanking dies horribly, and suspend does NOT work. Screen blanking works fine for C610. Suspend also fails. Documented how to switch between wired and wireless on Dells.

19 September 2002: Tested blank/suspend/resume on IBM T30 and R32. Works fine.

18 September 2002: Dell Latitude C640 entry added -- untested. Stated that disconnected operation sort of works.

16 September 2002: Dell Latitude C840 will NOT work until an upgrade of XFree86 comes from RedHat. The other 3 systems are flagged as working if you partition by hand.

Last updated: $Date: 2004/09/07 22:11:38 $ by $Author: wdc $.
Comments to wdc@mit.edu