TuxMobil: Linux on the Xeron Sonic Mobile Pro Laptop

Specs

Mobile Pentium 4-M 1.7GHz, 256MB RAM DDR, 40GB HDD, DVD/CD-RW Combo, 15" SXGA+, 3xUSB (1.1), Modem, 10/100 LAN, IEEE1394 (FireWire), NVidia Geforce4 420 go, i810 Sound, Toshiba SD/MMC.
The case looks veeeeery similar to the Toshiba Satellite 3000 - series and the machine contains slightly different (further developped) hardware. It also incorporates groovy blue LEDs.
Do not get irritated by the switch and LED for WLAN, Xeron does not have internal WLAN for the Sonic Mobile Pro available.

Installation

This system was installed with Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r1. The installation was rather painless, due to the optical drive being an internal IDE-drive. A custom kernel 2.4.20 and GNOME2 were installed, too.

BIOS

You may reach the Phoenix BIOS with F2. Hitting c on startup lets you boot from a CD.

Keyboard

The keys < < > > | didn't work. We had to get a DOS tool from Xeron to correct this.

CD-R

Burning CD-Rs works as usual, designate hdc to ide-scsi by appending "hdc=ide-scsi" to the kernel start and loading the module ide-scsi. Burning CD-RW and playing DVD was not tested.

APM/ACPI

Only ACPI was tried, which works a little. You can use the speed-stepping features in /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/(performance|throttling), but the system freezes when waking up from S1 (/proc/acpi/sleep). When the lid is closed, the screen is turned off and shutting down works properly. /proc/acpi/fan, /proc/acpi/thermal_zone and /proc/acpi/ac_adapter do not show anything.

PCMCIA

The current version (3.2.3) of PCMCIA-CS was installed and everything worked at once. The driver for the controller is i82365.

USB

The controllers are driven by usb-uhci and that is it.

IEEE1394

FireWire works as well, load ohci1394 and off you go.

Ethernet

Piece of cake, take the driver 8139too.

Sound (ALSA)

The current version (0.9.0rc6) of Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ALSA was installed and the driver snd-intel8x0 does well.

Console

Framebuffer support for VESA works, 1280x1024@16.

XFree86

Since the current drivers (1.0-4191) from NVidia(http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp) were used, XFree86 4.1.0.1 shipped with Woody works good. The known 2D performance penalty with these drivers is not to be felt on the P4.
Also check: YanC(http://yanc.sourceforge.net/) (Yet another nV Configurator) is a small tool which you can use to change the nVidia-specific settings (almost) as easily as with the Windows drivers. You can edit the settings for the AGP-Support, the Cursor Shadow, the nVidia-Logo, for Digital Vibrance Control and, of course, TwinView. Furthermore, YanC offers the possibility to run your OpenGL applications (e.g., games) with your favourite settings for antialiasing, anisotropic texture filtering, and vsync to blank without difficult commandline operations.

SD-Card Reader

Not yet tested.

Modem

It is likely, that the pctel driver(http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/pctel-linux/) will work. At least in some way, but it did not. It was not tried very hard, though.

Other Resources

Credits

Sebastian Henschel