With:

• Internal 10/100 Ethernet
• Internal 802.11b WiFi (!!)
• SXGA (1280x1024) display, nVidia GeForce2 GO display adapter
• Big disk (20GB), big memory (512MB)
• DVD-ROM
• 933MHz Pentuim III

Gateway's site: Gateway 9550

What Has Been Tested:

• X windows and Gnome at 1280x1024
• Wireless 802.11b WiFi internal Ethernet
• Hardwire 10/100 internal Ethernet
• Keyboard, Mouse, and the left/right buttons
• Battery gauge
• DVD-as-CD-ROM

What Doesn't Work (Yet):

• Suspend: the nVidia driver won't permit suspension as it's currently configured. Since the people at nVidia have been so great, and I was able to suspend prior to installing the nVidia drivers, I'm sure that will come along. All of our other Gateways suspend just fine.

What hasn't been tried:

• Sound
• Scroll Buttons
• Modem
• DVD (although the DVD on my previous Gateway worked fine with LiVid) The DVD works as a CD-ROM just fine.
• USB
• Firewire

My Opinion:

SilkSpeed has purchased several Gateway laptops, all running Linux, all working well. This was by far the most difficult installation, mostly since the 9550 is a brand new product for Gateway. But it's a great package: all this for $2500! Our other Gateway laptops, all 9500's, have a very clean and easy Red Hat 7.1 install, with everything working out of the box.

RedHat 7.1 Installation:

Enter the laptop's bios setup to make it boot from DVD-ROM. Apparently, at least for the system I had, the Windows ME load circumvents DVD booting until you enter the bios setup and save the default boot order setting, which has booting from DVD and then floppy before booting from the hard disk.

Wipe the disk with fdisk by repeating RedHat installations. It appears that the MBR has some display initialization, because I was not be able to do an X installation until I fdisk'd away the DOS partition.

I manually partitioned with fdisk:

    hda1: 100M    /boot
    hda2: 17.5G   /
    hda3: 1.5G    swap
  

Repeated 'out of disk' errors were reported copying the install image, so I increased the /boot to 100M, which wasn't intuitive to me. Maybe my CD-ROM disk was dirty.

Install all packages (Custom Install/Everything). You will need the kernel source later!

X configuration: Set up X configuration, but DO NOT TEST IT!!! You'll get X running later.

• nVidia GeForce card
• Generic 1280x1024 Laptop Panel

This will make editing the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file easier later.

Make sure to select text boot mode! X WILL NOT WORK UNTIL YOU COMPLETE THE STEPS OUTLINED BELOW, so if you boot into X, life will be harder.

After installation:

Happily, the Orinico 802.11b modem in the laptop works like a champ. The only wrinkle is that the script that gets it properly running assumes that it's a PCMCIA card that gets hot plugged.

You configure it by editing /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opt

Right now I have a very simple script cloned from /etc/hotplug/net.agent for starting the 802.11b interface. It calls /etc/pcmcia/wireless and ifup in turn to start the interface.

Unfortunately, the 10/100 port has an unrecognized PCI device id: 1031. It's a new variant of the eepro100 chip, which is device id 1030. At least that's what I think it is. The following works for me:

Patch the following lines into /usr/src/linux-2.4/drivers/net/eepro100.c:

--- eepro100.c.org  Thu Sep 20 10:47:15 2001
+++ eepro100.c  Thu Sep 20 10:47:55 2001
@@ -155,6 +155,9 @@
 #ifndef PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ID1030
 #define PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ID1030 0x1030
 #endif
+#ifndef PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ID1031
+#define PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ID1031 0x1031
+#endif
 
 
 int speedo_debug = 1;
@@ -2194,6 +2197,8 @@
  { PCI_VENDOR_ID_INTEL, PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ID1029,
    PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, },
  { PCI_VENDOR_ID_INTEL, PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ID1030,
+   PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, },
+ { PCI_VENDOR_ID_INTEL, PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ID1031,
    PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, },
  { PCI_VENDOR_ID_INTEL, PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_82820FW_4,
    PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, },
    

Then copy the appropriate .config from /usr/src/linux-2.4/configs. I used kernel-2.4.2-i686.config:

#cd /usr/src/linux-2.4
#cp configs/kernel-2.4.2-i686.config .config
    

Then make the new driver:

#make oldconfig
#make dep
    

You only need to build and install the eepro100 module, but the most straightforward way to build the single module you need is to build them all. Lots of modules will still be built, and that takes a while, but that doesn't matter: you will only install one single module, the eepro100.

#make modules
    

For me the make took 20 minutes or so: the default kernal configuration with RH 7.1 has virtually ever possible module being built. Copy the new module over the original one:

#cp drivers/net/eepro100.o  /lib/modules/2.4.2-2/kernel/drivers/net
    

and add this line to /etc/modules.conf:

alias eth0 eepro100
    

Then run depmod:

#depmod
    

You will need perform the rest of your network configuration, but you should be able to get the 10/100 card running.

Install the module, start the interface.

#modprobe eepro100
#ifup eth1
    

Note: Since the 10/100 ethernet chips were not loadable at boot time, the order of the ethernet interfaces are different right now than after you reboot: Until you reboot, eth1 will be the 10/100 port, eth0 is the Orinoco port. After you reboot, eth0 will be the hardwire 10/100 port, and eth1 will be the 802.11b WiFi Orinoco ethernet interface. These directions don't assume a reboot.

Getting X Running

This is the main event: installing the nVidia modules, and getting X running.

First: DO NOT RUN Xconfigurator from this point on: it doesn't know about what you are installing, and will overwrite your modifications.

Second: A disclaimer: I installed the latest XFree86 (1.4.0) while working on this. I now don't think I needed to do so, and so have omitted that from these notes.

Follow the directions specified in the nVidia linux page. Since you won't have X, you might have to use Lynx, which works just fine.

Grab the appropriate (and latest) RPMs. What I used were:

• NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-1541.i386.rpm
• NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-1541.rh71up.i386.rpm

Then go back to nVidia's Linux README. Follow the directions carefully. I had a problem installing the kernel RPM, with the GLX module reporting the kernel module as missing, so I ended up using rpm -ivh --forceto install it.

The nVidia directions will instruct you to:

• Install the RPMs
• Edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file
• make sure "alias char-major-195 NVdriver" is in /etc/modules.conf

In addition to those directions, add the following line to /etc/modules.conf right after the "alias char-major-195 NVdriver" line:

options  NVreg_Mobile=5
    

Then run depmod again:

#depmod

You can try this all manually by installing the module with:

#modprobe NVdriver NVreg_Mobile=5
#startx
    

Summary

All of SilkSpeed's laptops are Gateways, and they all run Linux quite well. Except for the nVidia suspend issue on the Gateway 9550, they are flawless development platforms, and we recommend them highly.

rdynes@silkspeed.com