Joey's Debian GNU/Linux on my Laptop Guide
Created on December 17th, 1999.
Last updated on April 24th, 2000.

I am still working on this guide and will be adding more things to it as they come to mind.

Okay first things first. I have one laptop and its a WinBook LM. I got Debian GNU/Linux running on it, but I might just be lucky. I have seen endless complaints about laptops being hard to set up etc so I am guessing that each laptop will be different in how things are set up. Here are the stats on mine:

WinBook LM
Intel Pentium150
40 Megs Ram
1.2 Gig harddrive
Swappable Floppy and CDROM
12.1 TFT display
896KB Neo Magic Chipset
ESS1688 Sound Card

So lets begin. It came with Windows 95 but who really wants to run Windows on a P150 Laptop? Definetly not me. Anyhow, I had the Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 i386 cdrom but unfortunatly mine wasn't bootable so I was forced to make boot disks. Another problem was that I couldn't "hot-swap" the floppy or cdrom so I had to use one or the other.

So what did I do? I went to ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/slink/main/disks-i386/current and downloaded the following files:

root.bin - This is the main boot disk to start the install.

resc1440.bin - This is the Rescue Disk.

drv1440.bin - This is the Drivers Disk.

base14-1.bin, base14-2.bin, base14-3.bin, base14-4.bin, base14-5.bin, base14-6.bin, base14-7.bin
- These are the main files for a base install of Debian.

Once I downloaded all the files, I converted them to disks by using either the rawrite command in windows or the dd if=filename.bin of=/dev/fd0 command in linux.

Next, I rebooted the machine with the rescue.bin disk (The initial Debian Boot disk) and followed the directions on the screen. It will ask you where you want to install from, I choose fd0 since I was going to install by using floppies. Then it asks you for the rescue disk followed by the drivers disk.

Now, once the base system was installed, I had to reboot the box so it could start Debian. This is where I made the floppy to cdrom switch. Once Debian loads up, it will ask you a bunch of configuration questions and allow you to add users to the system etc. The next step is to select what packages you want to install. On the main screen, choose custom and select whatever it is you want to install.

It's been a couple of months now so I'm not sure what comes next. After you reboot with Debian fully installed, you'll probably want to configure everything. I got my soundcard working fairly easy since I have a similar card on my server. I just edited /etc/modutils/arch/i386 and placed the following lines into the file:

alias midi opl3
options opl3 io=0x388
options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 mpu_io=0x330

These will definetly be different with your machine. Check your manual for more information on the soundcard you have, but you get the basic idea. Also, Debian 2.1 (what I installed) is almost a year old, and basically out of date. Since I have a high speed connection, I upgraded to 2.2 which was an easy but tricky process, but I won't get into it here.

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