Linux and BeOS on a Compaq Presario 1800T

I have succeeded in installing both Slackware Linux and BeOS 4.5.2 on a Compaq Presario 1800T notebook computer. (I think the "T" indicates that it's a custom-built unit ordered directly from Compaq).

I used System Commander to resize the Windows partition so I could preserve the existing Windows installation, but I found that System Commander wouldn't boot an OS out of a logical partition more then 8 MB into the disk so I use the BeOS boot loader (bootman) as a startup menu.

Linux

More details on my Linux installation are available here. Be sure to read the following below too.

The Hardware

The machine comes with the following hardware:
450 MHz Pentium III Coppermine CPU (0.18 micron process) with 100 MHz system bus.
I waited until the coppermine Pentium III laptops were released before getting a laptop because Pentium II laptops have 66 MHz system busses even if the CPU runs at high speed. I understand AMD K-6 laptop chips are 100 MHz though
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet (DEC Tulip 21142)
Compaq's biggest mistake in advertising this laptop is that they simply didn't mention this major selling point of the machine on their web page. It's just wonderful having integrated ethernet - no need to screw around with PCMCIA cards.

A couple problems were found in using the ethernet that are easily worked around. The DEC Tulip chip has an EEPROM on it that can be reprogrammed by the manufacturer. This makes it very difficult for a single driver to support all the varieties of tulip chips out there. In the case of the Compaq Presario 1800, if you do a soft reboot from Windows into BeOS or Linux, the EEPROM will be initialized to something the driver doesn't understand. You need to do a cold boot if you go from Windows and you'll be wanting to use ethernet.

Secondly, the tulip.c driver that comes with the Linux 2.2.13 kernel (as found in Slackware 7) doesn't work at all with this chip, but the experimental version that can be found on the author's website works fine.

And finally, the chip seems to go into 100 bps mode if the machine comes up with the ethernet cable plugged in. Wait until the machine is booted to plug in the ethernet cable. I think this only applies to Linux and not BeOS.

ATI Rage Pro LT video chip
This is a laptop version of the ATI Rage Pro; the Rage Pro support in older versions of XFree86 don't work but the current XFree86 does. When I originally install Slackware 4 XWindows wouldn't work, but after building the XFree86 latest server from sources it worked fine.
1024 by 768 15" active matrix LCD screen
What else can I say? This is just wonderful. But there is a problem with the screen. It's not dim enough! That's right! It's too bright. It's great for using in an office environment but I usually program in my dimly lit living room and when I turn the brightness down all the way it's uncomfortably bright. I also feel that it's wasting power on this excessive brightness. The brightness also is only adjustable in a few discrete steps. I wish it would adjust dimmer and in finer steps so I could get it just where I want it.
ESS Solo 1 sound chip
The main reason I chose this particular model of laptop, and not, say, a Dell was because it had hardware supported by the BeOS, particularly the ESS Solo 1 shound chip and the ATI Rage Pro video. I couldn't get sound to work under linux at first but then found I'd overlooked the chip in the kernel configuration options, so I do get sound in Windows, Linux and BeOS. It comes with JBL Pro laptop speakers which really are pretty good for a laptop - if you're listening to an audio CD and sitting right there the audio quality is pretty nice. I haven't tried the audio input yet, but plan to try using the BeOS to record some reasonably high-quality audio and will let you know how it goes.
DVD and CD drive
I got the DVD drive mainly so I could watch DVD's while traveling on airplanes. I've been disappointed by the machines battery life, though - I can't watch all three episodes of Monty Python on a single DVD disk out of the set I bought before traveling over Christmast. If I carried a spare battery, that would be fine.

One really nice thing about the DVD/CD drive is that there are buttons on the machine that allow me to turn on the CD player and play and control an audio disk without booting the computer. This is really great on long car trips. The sound is a little tinny for filling a whole car but beats silence when you're far from radio stations.

The damn Fn button
where the control key is on most standard keyboards is a button labeled Fn. If you hold down this button and press other buttons among the F-keys, you can adjust such things as the brightness. The good news is that this works even in Linux and the BeOS, so it must be wired directly into the motherboard or BIOS. The bad thing is that it's where the control key is supposed to be, and the control key itself is just to the right, which really drives me crazy, especially in windows where the control key is the standard modifier key (I much prefer the behavior of the BeOS, which uses the Alt key by default).
Synaptics trackpad
I also would have liked to have bought an IBM Thinkpad, but I can't stand those little nipple thingies they use for mice. I wish IBM would follow the lead of some vendors who offer both, to make everyone happy. Thinkpad's are quality machines but I won't use one.

The trackpad works pretty well but I have a problem with it spuriously sensing the base of my thumb near it and making the cursor jump. Sometimes it registers clicks. The effect of this is that I'll be typing at the end of a paragraph and suddenly the insertion point will jump to the middle and continue, garbling my text. There is a control panel under windows to adjust the track pad in many ways, but I haven't been able to make this completely stop yet.

The Partitions

On an "intel" partition map you can have four "primary" partitions. You can choose to have one of your four partitions be an "extended" partition, and inside of that you can put several "logical" partitions.

There are all kinds of weird limitations to what you can do with a logical partition. I may not have partitioned my disk the best way possible, but here's what I have. On an 18 GB disk, I have the original Windows 98 installation in the first primary partition. The second primary partition is reserved for later use when I install NT; I've been trying to install it but have not yet succeeded in doing so.

The third partition is an extended partition. This is divided into six logical partitions. A 1 GB Linux ext2fs partition (I installed first Slackware Linux 4, then Slackware 7), a 128 MH Linux swap partition, and a 4 GB Linux ext2fs partition.

Windows 98 insists on calling one of my linux partitions the D: drive and offers to reformat it whenever I empty the trash. I have to be very careful about not allowing it to, and instructing other users of my computer to be careful too.

1 GB for Linux root is about the minimum necessary if you install most everything that comes with slackware; even then I couldn't just let the installation rip when I upgraded from 4 to 7 and had to go through and pick out the individual packages.

Any software I download and install myself I put in the /home partition and put a link to it in /usr/local or wherever it normally wants to live in the root partition. This way I can blow away my root partition if a future linux installation gets wedged, with minimal loss. This has actually happened on another computer; a real problem I have with Slackware is that's it's pretty braindead about doing upgrades as opposed to fresh installs.

The remaining logical partitions are 2 GB for BeOS 4.5.2, 1 GB set aside to be used for BeOS 5 when it is released, and 2 GB for BeOS user files.

I don't just install a new BeOS over the old one when it arrives. This isn't because I don't trust that it will work, but because applications built on new versions of the BeOS are usually binary incompatible with old versions. It is possible to build using the old API, but you still need an old system for testing. I try to support my applications one major release out of date on the BeOS - this is quite a lot of work, considering that I also support them on PowerPC BeOS as well.

Linux is booted by installing LILO in the superblock of the root filesystem. The machine as a whole is booted with the BeOS "bootman" boot menu. Even though I purchased System Commander Deluxe and used it to resize my Win98 partition and add the other partitions, System Commander Deluxe would not boot BeOS out of a logical partition that is more than 1024 cylinders into the disk. This is a common limitation - but the BeOS boot menu has no problem with it.

System Commander 2000 is available now and I was told at the time by tech support that it would not have this limitation.

Flash - System Corrupted

I attempted to install NT, hoping this would make my Windows development system more robust. I had the following problems: I'm backing up my partitions to BeOS, then ethernetting them to my desktop PC, then I'm going to destroy the partition table and replace it.

I think the root cause of my problem is Compaq's weird partition tables, used for some kind of crash recovery, but it confuses disk utilities.

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