SuSE Linux 6.1

This page is now out of date and no longer maintained. I keep it here purely for reference purposes.

If you want more information about repairing laptops, or Linux on laptops try TuxMobil or Repair4Laptop.

My first attempt at installing Linux on a Laptop was in 2000 with SuSE 6.1 on the B2154. I had only 6 months before really got it working on my home PC, but as I was off to a fairly isolated Seismic camp (my old job in Nigeria) for the next year & I wanted to take a copy with me to play with and continue to learn about the OS. The following year had plenty of problems, and the lack of an internet connection for research/ driver download meant that more than once I considered giving the whole thing up.

I should mention before I start that I did do this years ago, and so my memory isn't perfect.

Installation

I decided to install Linux soon after buying my B2154, I didn't go for the Windows 98 option with a CDROM, instead I went for the Windows 2000/ NT version without and bought a seperate PCMCIA DVDROM. The installation interface for SuSE 6.1 was the very basic text based Yast 1 (well, at that time it was just called Yast), and it took me quite a while to determine that the install process couldn't detect my DVDROM (not surprising, as neither could the 'just out' Windows 2000). In the end I managed to borrow a Parallel Port CDROM drive from a friend (that was 5 years ago - I really should return it) and using the modules floppy disks I found on the first CD (there was no need to feed in any module options, once I loaded parport it found the drive pretty quickly) I got the installation running.

This was of course the old days of Linux, and once installation was finished all you got was the UNIX style command line, X had to be set up manually with SaX (the predecessor to the GUI based SaX2), however once you set it up you could select a GUI based login. I remember that I could at the time only get 256 colours, but it gave me a warm feelig inside to finally have a working Linux laptop. I've described below the fun I had with the rest of the hardware.

Network Card, IRDA, Hibernation, Application Panel, USB

I never had any of these working under SuSE 6.1, except USB, which involved upgrading to Kernel 2.4 and installing USB tools.

PCMCIA

The PCMCIA card services were at this time (Kernel 2.2.10 I think) seperate from the Kernel, installed using an external PCMCIA package. I picked up the latest copy from here which I remember installed and worked after a few attempts, I don't however know which version I used, sorry.

Modem

At the time Winmodem detection was pretty unusual. Luckily one of the early versions of the Lucent winmodems driver (ltmodem) was available and worked straight away. More information is available from Linmodems.org, and from Christoph Hebeisens' ltmodem pages.

Touchscreen

The Touchscreen drivers for XFree 3 can be found at Parzelles' Website.