Mandrake 10.1 Official on Inspiron 1100

Upgrading Mandrake 10.0 to Mandrake 10.1 Official on my heavy, bulky Inspiron 1100. The steps, in case I need to redo them. Configurations from previous installation of Mandrake 10.0 is clearly marked - I might need to redo them in I am doing a fresh install.

(I upgraded Mandrake 10.1 to Mandrive 2005 LE. Nothing fancy. Whatever tweaks were necessary are reported in my blog.)

Generally I prefer fresh installs. However, this time I thought about trying the upgrade option. I also had all the 4 CDs this time. Lets see happens. This was the architecture which is being upgraded.
- 5 partitions - / (ReiserFS), /usr (ReiserFS), /home (ext3), swap, /boot. /home was already there and I did not want to format it. The reason for ReiserFS is just this article (I did not do a detailed investigation; I just wanted a good Journal FS).
(From previous installation) Small screen issue - found out Dell has released a BIOS update A29. Flashed BIOS. There was some problem during the first boot - but it was fixed after a reboot.
Cleaned up /boot and lilo.conf - it was all cluttered with previous installation labels. Also removed source and module directories of old installations.
Small console (text screen/framebuffer mode). Modified the boot line to add vga=791 (mode=0x305 - check in src/linux/Documentation/fb/vesafb.txt). (From previous installation) Also removed acpi=ht from boot options. Set the default lilo option.
There was some problem with the mouse/touchpad. I changed the new /etc/X11/xorg.conf by comparing with the previous /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.old. Ah... the usb-mouse atleast works.
First proper bootup ... oops... no startup sound. The "External Amplifier" problem. Removed the patch in startup script from previous installation (in short - do nothing to the startup scripts).
Somehow the mixer setting were not stored across reboots. Forcefully did a alsactl store and checked the file /etc/asound.state to see if everything was ok.
(From previous installation) Remove unnecessary softwares (using Software manager).
Install kdeutils-klaptop (for the laptop utils)
- set the power options, throttle levels, low battery warning etc...
(From previous installation) Installed mplayer, gmplayer, Realplayer, Acroread, openoffice, xmms, xmms-arts
(From previous installation) Installed wireless tools
(From previous installation) Installed synaptics driver. Added evdev to the modules preload list (check in /proc/config.gz if EVDEV is compiled or used as module).
(From previous installation) Adding nice startup sound (took the ogg files from Knoppix CD, changed them to wav, and added them).
(From previous installation) Set the lookandfeel options, made the menu transparent, set the number of workspaces, added mouse gestures
(Yet to do)Changed the link to dm in /etc/rc5.d/ to a small number so that it starts quickly (before some other process like sound, pcmcia etc). By the time I actually login, sound and others get enough time to load so this effectively gives a quicker boot.
(Yet to try)Install software for pctel modem ... oops! Recalled that it wont run of box, need to play and see if I can compile it in kernel 2.6.
(From previous installation) Synaptic touchpad had the horizontal and vertical scrolling messed up! Commented the xmodmap line in /etc/X11/xinit.d/mouse_buttons and set both the mouse and touchpad to have ZAxisMapping of "4 5".
(From previous installation) Installed kbiff (its not in the 3 CDs - so have to add a Mandrake-ftp-mirror as urpmi source.
Added contrib ~~and PLF sources~~(seems link is down) to urpmi sources (PLF). Then removed the original mplayer which comes without faad support and installed the PLF mplayer.
Added xcompmgr and turned on the shadows. Wow... only its a bit slow. Otherwise it looks so nice. Also got the latest Baghira style and win-deco. But first I must figure out the reason behind the high PC internal temparature - otherwise the shadows will only heat things up.
Suddenly noticed a message during booting saying that devfs was used instead of udev. That should not be ... removing all devfs related stuff in lilo.conf.
Installed cpudyn (given in the contrib packages of Mandrake 10.1). The default parameters seem to be logical ... lets me try them a few days and see.
Aha ... the standby/suspend/hibernate myth. Let me first try the CLI and then I will shift to the funky klaptop tray icon. Ok ...
- standby seems to work - [echo -n standby > /sys/power/state] OR [echo 1> /proc/acpi/sleep]. The klaptop icon also works. Also, if the lid is closed, the laptop is sent to standby mode.
- hibernate (suspend to disk) also works - [echo -n disk > /sys/power/state] OR [echo 4/4b> /proc/acpi/sleep]. The klaptop icon also works.
- suspend (suspend to ram) works - [echo -n mem > /sys/power/state]. However, the resume is unable to restore the display if we are in framebuffer mode (the general observation is this: after resuming, the screen remains blank, power light remains turned on. See if it is accepting keyboard input - try find / - this should cause heavy disk activity if keyboard is enabled. If not, then find some other way of connecting to the machine e.g. ssh and you will see that it is alive and can be safely rebooted.).
  Based on Bugzilla bug 3670, I decided to stay away from framebuffer mode. So, I removed "vga=..." line from the boot options (i.e. from lilo.conf), downloaded and compiled video_post for userspace vga re-initialization and used the following for suspend [echo -n mem > /sys/power/state && modprobe i830 && /root/emu/video_post]
You might need to use the Sysrq magic if video does not reinitialize and you apparently think that hard booting is the only way out. Briefly, press Alt+SysRq (in my Dell 1100, SysRq = Fn+Delete) and then press S twice to sync the filesystems and then press B to reboot.
The CPU is getting too hot. Tried a couple of things and now I can hear the fan running whenever the laptop temparature is getting high. Dont remember the full details, but these are the prime steps.
- Enabled laptop mode sysctl [echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode ]
- Checked that my proessor and kernel support cpu-speed scaling (not the hifi speedstep one) method [cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/] and then installed,configured cpufreq and cpudynd (IIRC, the contrib packages had the rpms for most of the extra things that I got)
- Got the i8k tools, modprobe-d i8k, installed gkrellm-fmonitor plugin and wrote a script to read fan speed and put that in a file for fmonitor to monitor. I did not particularly like the i8krellm plugin because it gave no option of passive observing the fan speed; i8krellm itself controls the fan speed which I did not like. BTW Dell Inspiron 1100 has only one fan.
The i8k module has another advantage, it is supposed to generate the keysyms XF86AudioMute etc. for the mute, volume increase and volume decrease key. However, it was refusing to do so :(. Anyway, I used xev to get the keycodes for those 3 buttons (the eject button would give no keycode, thats due to some problem with setkeycodes - which I another story) and the i button (beside the power button). Then I used xmodmap to assign the keycodes proper symbol during every kde startup.
```
    keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
    keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
    keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
    keycode 129 = XF86WWW
    
```
Since kmilo is autoloaded with kde, no further setting is required for the volume controls. A volume progress bar, e.g., comes in the middle of the screen whenever I press the volume-up button. It was annoying at the beginning that the kmix applet was oblivious of the volume changes made by these buttons, but a quick check with the latest source, revealed that the next version has all these fixes. Soon I upgraded to KDE3.3.0 and everything was in place. I also mapped the i button to konqueror (using konqueror shortcuts).
I tried the latest slmodem-2.9.10 driver for my 8086:24c6 (PCTel id:4c21) Intel AC97 modem and it seems it works. Only problem is that the new pppd sometimes causes LCP timeouts during handshake and fails.
Knotes was not saving the notes (upon exit or individual closing of notes). I tried a number of tricks including removing the rc files but nothing work. Ultimately turned out to be a version bug - updated to new knotes from cooker and now the knotes work as expected (well not really - the colours I set for background etc. are lost for old notes - but I dont care). For information
```
	 $ knotes -v
		Qt: 3.3.3
		KDE:3.3.0
		KNotes: 3.4
	
```
Wanted to play the realplayer streams. www.foxnews.com webpage seemed to be a good test page. Downloaded Helixplayer and it works for that page. There are some issues left, but I will worry about them later.
Got an Olympus C5050Z camera - used it as a mass storage device with digikam - works flawlessly. (However I did noy try to upload pictures into the camera). One small glitch: for some reason if I insert the camera (or my USB pen drive) while the klaptop daemon is running, suddenly the klaptopdaemon starts taking 100% cpu. So I generally kill the laptop daemon before I insert the USB devices).
xcompmgr and transset-df are working quite good. I really like the translucent windows and smooth fading, menu opening and closing. I have set the gkrellm to be always on top and gave it a transparency of 0.6 so I can see everything behind it without losing desktop space. The setting I found useful are
xcompmgr-2.02 -r 6 -o .63 -l -8 -t -6 -I 0.015 -O 0.02 -D 3 -cCfF &
transset-df --name gkrellm -t 0.6.
The default suspend/hibernate actions from klaptop was not good for me. I modefied the provided klaptop_acpi_helper (also had to take care of draksec otherwise it wont allow the patched file to exist). Remember to set its permission to -rwsr-sr-x. The patched one looks for the files /usr/sbin/acpi_sleep, /usr/sbin/acpi_suspend, /usr/sbin/acpi_hibernate for sleep, suspend or hibernate. The good thing is, now I use the same scripts to sleep/suspend etc. from the command line as well as from klaptop.

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can be found in my blog