The build your own laptop kit.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

The hell?
I tried again and this time the boot hung right after the splash screen.

[zandrax]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

The hell?
I tried again and this time the boot hung right after the splash screen

Stability isn't the strength point of your new portable: you should find the cause of all these locks. Try removing the bottom cover (the one covering cpu, chipert, memory, wifi and heatsink), power up the notebook and let it heat a bit; then flip it and touch all suspect chips with a finger. The hottest, perhaps the one you can barely touch, is likely to be the culprit.
Another troubleshooting mesaure is the minimal configuration: remove one dimm and the wifi module then power it up and stress test it for hours. Add one deivice at ime unless you have instability.

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well removing the wi-fi module (for now) and entering pci=noacpi fixed the boot issue but now I somehow have to install ubuntu and grub the two OS's without killing the 10Gb partition that has windows on it.
This is entirely new to me as I have always setup linux on a dedicated system. I have never had to make a multiboot system.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Zandrax, I need your help. :P

[Paul S]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Most Linux installers will easily install with Windows on the first partition. I would not let the partitioner do automatic partitioning.

You usually create three partitions for Linux, depending on the amount of room:
10GB= / (boot+root) ext3
1024MB = swap (HD memory partition)
10GB = /home (folder for users) ext3

If you have the room, increase the two larger partitions, as you can easily fill them up. You can make them smaller, too (5GB). I would stay away from using the LVM format for partitions, as this renders them unreadable by anything but the original OS.

If you have another partition of 5GB available, you can install another Linux distro. You re-use the swap and /home partitions from the other install. Just remember that the Grub installation of the last one you installed will be the one that shows at boot.

I currently have WinXP, Fedora 8 and openSUSE 10.2 on my laptop. Here is the layout of my hard drive, using the Linux command fdisk:

[paul2@localhost ~]$ /sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4d3d4d3d

  Device Boot   Start     End   Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1  *      2    3825  30716280  7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2      3826    5737  15358140  83 Linux
/dev/sda3      5738    12161  51600780  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5      5738    5834   779121  82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6      5835    8368  20354323+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7      8369    12161  30467241  83 Linux

Edit: BE CAREFULL!! You can easily wipe out the WinXP partition, so back up any important data. This is why I use the manual partitioning, as it is easy to see the Windows NTFS partiton, and make sure that you are not reformatting that too.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

I Have like 30Gb free.

So what you want me to manually add is:

14GB= / (boot+root) ext3
1024MB = swap (HD memory partition)
15GB = /home (folder for users) ext3

Also, isn't giving "/" 14GB quite a bit? I'm an A/V guy and a mere 15GB can fill up pretty fast.

[zandrax]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Sorry pentium, I can't reply during mornings: I start posting about at 11 pm, or 12 am in your time zone, and sometimes I'm still here until 3 am, 4 pm for you. At 3 am my eyes are sore and my mind is tired ...

I Have like 30Gb free.

So what you want me to manually add is:

14GB= / (boot+root) ext3
1024MB = swap (HD memory partition)
15GB = /home (folder for users) ext3

Yeah, that's fine: Linux distros don't require a lot of space, in about 8 GB you can install a full-optional Ubuntu. I suggest at least 12 GB for / because it will store temporary files, updates, etc.
1 GB for swap is enough for 512 MB ram or less: if you can buy some sodimms, then you will rarely use the swap.
15 GB for /home: the home folder stores your data, so put it on a separate partition. It's like D: in Windows world: a partition always accessible and never touched by system upgrades or reinstallations. The rule of thumb is: the bigger the better, so use all free space unless you need another partition[s].
ext3 is the default file system for linux: it's better supported, very reliable, quite fast (though not the fastest) and the only one capable of being upgraded in future to ext4 without the need of repartitioning. Unless you have specific needings, ext3 is good enough.

Note: due to old IBM bios limitation, the MBR can't store more than 4 partitions, called primary ones. Now a windows and 3 linux primary partitions match exactly this limit; if you want another partition (say for another os), then you can only have 3 primary partition and an extended one: the extended is a sort of "container", a clever hack which fakes a primary partition and can host up to 32 or 64 logical partition (exact number is unknown, but it should be a few tens). The drawback is some os (mainly Windows) can't boot from logical partitions, so better use them as storage or swap only.

Ubuntu has a graphical partitioning tool, gparted, but this utility doesn't fully tolerate partitions created with windows' fdisk (it will complain about "partitions not ending on cylinder boundary": this is not very harmful, but explaining why is a long story and, this time, gparted is wrong).
My following recommendation may seem crazy to Paul_S, but since you have already installed Windows I'd suggest creating all linux partitions in Windows using the Volume management applet in Control panel: create them as fat32 ones, then reboot and install ubuntu; in gparted only format them as ext3 and swap partitions, don't touch their geometry and ignore the cylinder boundary warning. At last install grub on hard drive's mrb: it should recognize the windows partition and allow you to boot it.
If you can't boot windows, then boot ubuntu and open a console: type sudo install-grub and follow instructions.

Also, isn't giving "/" 14GB quite a bit? I'm an A/V guy and a mere 15GB can fill up pretty fast.

13 Gb are about 1 hour at DV quality so if you need some storage for editing, even the full 40 GB is little space: buy an external drive, better a model with high capacity (400-500 GB) and both USB and Firewire connections (the latter is faster and offloads some load from cpu). WD ofers a triple interface drive (USB2, Firewire 400 and eSata) for a slightly higher price: while eSata may seem a waste of money today, it is going to be more present in future and, at present, is the only connection whose bandwith is higher than disk one (USB2 is around 30-35 MB/s, Firewire between 30 and 40 depending on chipset, a 3.5" hdd peaks around 70-80 MB/s and Sata II / eSata is about 240 MB/s).
For multimedia use the best file system should be xfs, but it has a few glitches with external drives (e.g. corrputed partitions): fat32 is fast but can't store files greather than 4 GB, ntfs is reliable (with ntfs-3g) but slooooooow so better format the drive with ext3 again.

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well if the windows partition is in the way that much I guess it will not hurt to reinstall it again.

EDIT:
Partitioning is done.
Now it seems my Ubuntu cd is bad.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.


Strange, the installer says the cd is bad yet an integrity check finds no problems.
On the other hand, I manually partitioned the drive using the partitioner that loads with the installer and Not only were the three ubuntu partitions successfully made but the NTFS partition that holds Windows 2000 was not touched either.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Okay, I have finished installing Ubuntu and now all that is left is to add windows 2000 to GRUB, reinstall the wi-fi card and start configuring Ubuntu..

Now, how do I exactly add the option to boot into windows 2000/Ubuntu from GRUB?

[Paul S]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

The windows partition should have been automatically added to the grub boot loader. If it wasn't, you need to edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst (as root). Add this to the file and save it:

title Windows 2000
    rootnoverify (hd0,0)
    chainloader +1

As for partition sizes, zandrax isn't that different than my suggestions. A laptop isn't the best place to archive video files. I have Mythbunbtu installed on a PC with a 500GB drive, 40GB is used for the three OS partitions, the rest is one big partition for audio and video files.

I have read that the best file system for a MythTV video partition is JFS. This is not always available on every distro, so XFS is a good second choice. The JFS partition is good at deleting large files, such as videos that you have watched and now want to delete.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

I agree.
XFS is wonderful.
Half my SGI's use it.
Anyways, Grub did automatically add windows 2000 so that is out of my hair.
I can take care of things from here on in.

EDIT: On second thought.....
I restarted the system and it instantly hung on the boot screen.
Windows 2000 is fine but Ubuntu is being a PITA.

[Paul S]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

This sounds like the same problem that the original owner had.

Sometimes a Linux boot will get hung up on initializing a device. If you have it set for the network time protocol, and its not connected to the internet, that can do it.

Some hardware raid controllers will do this too. Try and watch the boot screen to see where it is hanging up. There are boot options that can be added to overcome some problems. (These can be added after the install too.)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

Also, booting in single user mode may help.
http://www.noah.org/wiki/Single_User_Mode

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

The only thing I know is that the system HATES acpi and it also does not like the Wi-Fi card.
That's the odd part. It used to not care about them. Why the hell does it hate them now?

[Paul S]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Add the boot parameter of acpi=off.

As for the wireless, that shouldn't keep it from booting up. On my laptop the wireless can't connect until I enter a password, so it does hang a little bit at boot. (you can see it on the boot screen). But it still boots ok.

If you want some help in configuring the wireless, I can help with that. There are some simple steps to determine the info needed to set it up. Just let me know.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well it is neither the acpi or the wireless that is causing the problem.

I find that as long as I keep pressing the enter key at boot the system will not hang (in other words you keeping the system busy). I have also found that if you hang while on the desktop, moving the mouse around or just left clicking will unfreeze it as well. What could be causing this?
I'm about to run the update manager so I hope it will get patched.

[Paul S]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

You can look at some of the system messages with this command. (You are comfortable with using a terminal, are you not?)

dmesg

Scroll back to view the whole output.

As for the cause of the problem, I might say that it could be the synaptics touchpad driver. But that shouldn't effect the keyboard, unless the keyboard output interrupts the bad touchpad output.

The other thing that it could be is the X system. It not only controls the video output, but the keyboard and mouse too. The configuration is stored in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Are you positive it is s driver?
Don't forget that it is happening even before the bootscreen comes up (Right after grub tells the kernel to boot but before most drivers come into play).
Anyways, once the system is up it is pretty much rock solid.

[Paul S]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

I was just taking a guess at what might cause the problem. Another guess could be conflicting IRQ port assignments. That can be changed in the kernel boot line too. The commands are related to the acpi=off parameter mentioned before.

Edit: The command to add is irqpoll

[pentium]

Re: The build your own laptop kit.

Well before we start entering more lines, lets look at how far back we have to go before the problem stops.

Back when I was attempting to run the install with acpi enabled I did not have this problem.
After we tried with acpi switched off the problem started.
I'm in a bit of a rut here as enabling acpi again will cause the kernel to panic and leaving it off will keep this problem.
Tell me where to add that line and I'll give it a shot anyways. When I think about it, a conflicting IRQ with the keyboard would cause similar problems.

EDIT: hold the phone.I removed the "pci=noacpi" and the system booted no problem.
I'll look into this a little further.

EDIT: after I posted that I turned around and was greeted by a laptop that had locked solid. Back to the drawing board.