Installing Linux on a DeskNote a900

This is a amptron desknote a900 machine. This one has a centaur samual II 733MHz cpu (marketed as a GigaPro), 14.1 XGA TFT screen, cdrom, external USB floppy, SiS630 chipset and a realtek 8139 network interface. This is not a real notebook in the sense it has no battery but it is certainly more like a notebook than a desktop machine!

I installed redhat-7.2, the installation failed the first time out 70% of the way in downloading files from an ftp server. The second time I installed a more minimal set of packages and it went smoothly. Experience with the SiS300 graphics on another notebook shows there are problems here but the FrameBuffer device is fine. Therefore do not test the X11 config in install or set the default login to level5 instead chose text login. The SiS630 chipset includes sound which was detected no problem. The net problems are due to a bug in the rtl8139too driver when it is used as a module (as in Redhat kernels), apparently this will be fixed in a future kernel release (I upgraded to 2.4.9-12 and it was still broken).

Configurating X the problem here is that the SiS301 chip is not recognised by Linux (no released spec's) therefore the framebuffer device has to be used. In the lilo.conf file I changed image=/boot/vmlinuz to become image=/boot/vmlinuz vga=0x317. This gives a framebuffer device of 1024x728 at 16bits. I installed the fbset rpm and the XF86-FBDev rpm. I had to manually link XF86_FBDev to X in the /usr/X11R6/bin directory. I then used the following XF86Config file

# Start for XF86Config for Framebuffer-Device
Section "Files"
 RgbPath        "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
 FontPath       "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
 AllowMouseOpenFail
EndSection
Section "Module"
EndSection
# This section is no longer supported
# See a template below
# Section "XInput"
# EndSection
Section "Keyboard"
 Protocol       "Standard"
 XkbRules       "xfree86"
 XkbModel       "us(pc101)"
 XkbLayout      "us"
 XKbSymbols     "pc101"
 XkbVariant     "nodeadkeys"
EndSection
Section "Pointer"
 Protocol               "PS/2"
 Device         "/dev/psaux"
 SampleRate             60
 BaudRate               1200
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
 Identifier     "Primary-Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Device"
 Identifier     "fbdev"
 VendorName     "fbdev"
 BoardName      "fbdev"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
 Driver        "fbdev"
 Device        "fbdev"
 Monitor       "Primary-Monitor"
 SubSection "Display"
 Depth       16
 Modes       "default"
 EndSubSection
EndSection