Linux on the Compaq Armada M700

Linux on the Compaq Armada 7750MT

Here is how I got Linux (RedHat 6.1) running on a Compaq Armada 7750MT. I gleaned much useful information from the Linux on Laptops page
The following describes what I did. I was successful, but I guarantee nothing, and accept no liability for lost data, damaged hardware or any other untoward happening in your life. If your toaster blows up as a result of installing Linux onto your laptop then that's your look out!

Backup

You did backup anything you want to keep, didn't you?

Make a RH boot floppy?

You can set the BIOS to boot directly from the CD so you don't need to do this. (Get to the BIOS by pressing F10 while there is a flashing cursor in the top-right corner during a boot.) In fact if you made a floppy and then tried to boot from it the install would fail as it would not find the CD ('cos the floppy is in the bay where the CD goes!)

Squeezing Windows

I didn't bother doing this as I didn't want to keep any windows stuff on the machine. However, here is a mini-howto telling you how to do it.

Make a FIPS disk. Available on the RH CD, look in dosutils/fips20. You need to copy fips.exe, restorrb.exe and errors.txt. Make sure you read the documentation first if you are not familiar with FIPS.

Turn off Windows virtual memory.

  My Computer -> Control Panel -> System -> Performance -> Virtual Memory
              -> Let Me specify ...
  then Disable virtual memory ...

Defrag disk

  Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System tools -> Disk Defragmenter

Reboot into DOS.
Use FIPS to shrink the Windows partition.
You now may want to reboot to Windows to restore virtual memory before you forget.

Do the Install

Reboot direct from the CD. I made new partitions but the default ones will work just as well. Just be careful that you don't delete the Compaq Diagnostics partition.

24M /boot
128M swap
the rest is home

Video

This laptop uses an S3 Virge card which is supported by X. The card has 2mb RAM. I set up my screen to be an "LCD 1024x768".

24 bit colour works, too, but is somewhat slower.

This should now reboot to a working system. However, don't be alarmed if the boot stalls the machine when it gets to the PCMCIA bit. If it does this then reboot and hit the 'I' key when you see the interactive startup message appear and then say no to PCMCIA when offered it. Everything else gets a yes. More about this later.

Final Touches

Sound

To get soundcard working run the 'sndconfig' tool from a command prompt. Whilst the laptop comes equipped with an ESS1668 sound card I couldn't get it to work. I set mine up to be a plain old sound blaster compatible on IRQ5.

If you get no sound out when you play something, start aumix and turn up the volume.

Modem

It's a plain old modem. It lives on ttyS1 (COM2). I tried it via Minicom and all went well.

CD player

The CD player is fine.

PCMCIA

The RH distribution contains the PCMCIA stuff, and it works although I had a few troubles. Reading the PCMCIA howto we can see that sometimes the IRQ probe that the PCMCIA driver does hangs the machine. This appears to affect some machines and not others. To fix this, edit the /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia file to show the following:

PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=i82365
PCIC_OPTS="irq_list=9,10" # any 2 free IRQ's will do
CORE_OPTS=

To set up a network card, edit the IP numbers into

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Suspend

Pressing the suspend button does what its meant to do. The machine appears to recover normally. Compaq claim that the machine can survive a week on a full charge but I haven't tried that.