Linux on Sager 3350, Kapok 3100B, ProStar 3593, Fosa Paragon III, ARM TS3100 Notebook/Laptop

The latop and installation instructions are from around the year 2000

Warning: This document is for amusement purposes only. You may damage or destroy your notebook if you follow any advice in this document. I installed linux on a Sager 3530 notebook computer. This notebook is manufacutered by Clevo/Kapok in Taiwan. It is also sold as the ProStar 3593, the Clevo/Kapok 3100B, and the Fosa Paragon III. The ARM TS3100 is probably the same machine as well. But it may be the Kapok 3100C. I think the 3100C differs in just a few respects. (It is hard to tell, but it may have a 66 MHz bus, Celeron processor, and no IEEE 1394 port) Gericom and UMAX also sell Kapok notebooks. ( The Notebook Jungle may contain some correct information on the shifting relations among notebook manufacturers and vendors. It is a good site, but most of what you read on the net regarding this subject is partially or wholly incorrect or out of date.) I bought directly from Sager-midern . The notebook seems well built, works well, and the hardware is well supported by linux. Unfortunately, I put off writing this for a few months, and there are some gaps in my memory.

I installed Debian GNU/Linux, but much of this information will be useful with other linux distributions. The user friendly install programs are improving rapidly with many distributions (Debian is behind the curve, but is otherwise probably a more sound distribution), but their chance of failure increases on laptops. The hardware is all more-or-less supported. The X server occaionally has some minor problems that may be related to a recently supported video chip. The sound chip is recently and imperfectly supported, but for most purposes, it works well. The USB and Firewire ports are recognized by the new development kernel drivers, but I haven't tested them further. I use an Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 combination ethernet/modem card (the 16 bit, PC card version, not the 32 bit cardbus version). It seems to work perfectly. So the hardware is quite well supported and support should improve rapdily.

You can boot the debian installation floppy or the installation CD-Rom. I used the Debian 2.1 release. But for the PC card services and the X server and the sound driver, an upgrade to 2.2 (potato) is neccessary. Booting from a floppy is very slow (~5 minutes) for some reason. Booting from the CD is also slow, but faster.

Recognizing the Entire Hard Drive

I got the 12 GB hard drive (there is also a 6 GB option), which causes a problem for installation. Under linux, fdisk only shows an 8.4 GB capacity. This is a common problem, and is not difficult to solve. I searched on google and found the information in an archived slashdot discussion. The harddrive can be removed simply pushing a latch and the data printed on the drive can be read immediately. The drive is a Toshiba MK1214GAP. Data sheets are available on the Toshiba web site. I can't remember exactly what I did, but this is the best I can reconstruct from my notes. In order for the entire drive to be recognized properly, I increased the number of cylinders in the partition table. The total number of sectors (from the data sheet or printed on the hard drive) is 23,579,136. The drive has C 16383/ H 16/ S 63 printed on it. I don't quite know why these numbers are given, as they lead to about 8.45 GB capacity which is the magic number, above which this problem appears. After booting the debian install CD, I choose F1 (or is it ctrl-alt F1, or maybe F2 ?), which gets me a simple shell prompt. Then I type 'fdisk'. Then, you can type 'p' to print the partition table. The company put the special restore partition on, and maybe another big empty DOS partion. fdisk shows 255 heads and 63 sectors. The formula for the desired number of logical cylinders is C = T/(H*S), where C is the number of logical cylinders, T is the actual total number of sectors, H is the number of heads and S the number of sectors. So we have C= 23579136/(63*255) = 1467.73. We round down and take C=1467. I choose "x" for extra functionality, then "c" to change the number of cylinders to 1467. (You can also choose a different number of head and sectors; some people recommened H 16/ S 63, but then you have to adjust C again. I kept H=255.) At this point I continued and made a linux swap partition and a few big partitions and then chose "w" to write the partition table. I rebooted to be safe.

Main Installation

Unless you have a good deal of experience installing linux, I would recommend waiting for Debian 2.2 (it should be out quite soon) or installing another distribution. I did a minimal Debian 2.1 install from a CD and then upgraded to Debian 2.2 so that my hardware would be better supported. I proceed with the usual Debian install. You don't need to choose any modules from the module list. You will need to install all new modules, anyway. I never get the option to boot from the hard drive to work properly. I recommend skipping that option and running lilo by hand later. I think I did make a boot floppy, but it boots so slowly, that I just continued to reboot from the installation CD until I got the boot from the hard drive to work properly. To reboot with the installation CD, at the prompt, you type "rescue root=/dev/hdax" where "x" is the number of your root partition. Then you answer a few questions that you always answer on your first reboot. You are dumped into dselect. I quit dselect immediately, because I knew that I wanted to upgrade to potato (2.2). I can't remeber how I got the potato packages; maybe I burned a CD with some of them. Or, I may have gotten the modem or the ethernet to work and then got the packages via apt. Anyway, the first thing I did after quitting dselect was to go to the archive on the 2.1 installation disk and install apt from the admin tools directory. At some point, I made an apt-able archive using apt-zip, or something. Then I could point /etc/apt/sources.list to this archive and do 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade' and I got a potato system. (Hopefully Debian 2.2 is out by the time you read this.) Anyway, I still find the initial dselect installation such a pain, that I did not install the packages which are normally marked for install. I only installed them when I noticed that they were missing. This means, for instance, that you have to do 'apt-get install mandb' at some point. I found that this was a reasonable way to go.

X Window System

I installed several X packages using apt-get. There may have been some kind of 'task' package that installed several of the commonly desired packages. The correct X server package is xserver-mach64. IIRC, you have to have XFree86 version 3.3.6 or later for the ATI Rage Pro chip to be supported. I copied another guy's XF86Config file. (He had the same display and video chip that I have.) My current /etc/X11/XF86Config is

Section "Keyboard"

    Protocol "Standard"
    AutoRepeat  500 5

EndSection

Section "Pointer"

#    Protocol    "PS/2"
#    Device      "/dev/psaux"
    Protocol    "Mousesystems"
    Device      "/dev/gpmdata"
    Emulate3Buttons
    Emulate3Timeout    50

EndSection

Section "Monitor"

    Identifier  "Kapok 1024x768 14.1 in. TFT"
    VendorName  "Kapok"
    ModelName   "1024x768 14.1 in. TFT"
    HorizSync   31.5 - 68.8
    VertRefresh 60 - 87

#   800x600 @ 72 Hz, 48.0 kHz hsync
    Modeline "800x600"     50     800  856  976 1040   600  637  643 666
#   1024x768 @ 76 Hz, 62.5 kHz hsync
    Modeline "1024x768"    85    1024 1032 1152 1360   768  784  787 823

EndSection

Section "Device"

    Identifier  "ATI Rage Pro"
    VendorName  "ATI"
    BoardName   "ATI"
#    VideoRam    4096
    Option      "lcd_center"
    Option      "fifo_aggressive"
    Option      "pci_burst_on"
    Option      "hw_cursor"

EndSection

Section "Screen"

    Driver      "accel"
    Device      "ATI Rage Pro"
    Monitor     "Kapok 1024x768 14.1 in. TFT"
    DefaultColorDepth 24
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       8
        Modes       "1024x768" "800x600"
        Virtual     1024 768
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       16
        Modes       "1024x768" "800x600"
        Virtual     1024 768
    EndSubsection
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes       "1024x768" "800x600"
        Virtual     1024 768
    EndSubsection
# Note that 32 bpp does not work with XFree86 3.3.2.3
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       32
        Modes       "1024x768" "800x600"
        Virtual     1024 768
    EndSubsection
EndSection

A few notes on this file: The mouse parameters allow you to use the touchpad and external mice (PS/2 and serial) all simulatneously under X and at the console if you have gpm set up properly. You can plug and unplug any of the mice on the fly. I use the following line in my /etc/init.d/gpm file

start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec $GPM -- -t ms -m /dev/ttyS0 -M -t ps2 -m /dev/psaux

This is not a particularly clean way of implementing this. These parameters should stored in variables or a file somewhere. You probably set gpm parameters in a different way. The important part is the parameters; everything after the final "--".

Pcmcia (PC Card) Support

This is the output of "cardctl ident" with my comibination ethernet/modem card.

"Intel", "EtherExpress(TM) PRO/100 LAN/Modem PC Card Adapter", "PRO/100 M16B", "1.00"

All I had to do was install the Debian 2.2 (potato) card services package and the card is recognized and the correct drivers are loaded. Hot swapping works well. You can pop the card in and out at any time. You can use Donald Becker's configuration program to change the data clock speed from 10 to 100 MHZ at any time (to override the automatic configuration).

If you build your own kernel from the 2.2.x series, you need to get the card services package and rebuild the modules. The 2.4.x modules will be included in the kernel source. But necessary card services programs, "cardmgr" and "cardctl" are still distributed separatly. These do not normally need to be recompiled.

Using a crossover cable and making a card-to-card connection with a desktop macine with a 100MHz card, I can get, at most, about 1.5 MB/s transfer rate. If I manually set the cards to 10MHz, I get about 1.0 MB/s transfer rate. From what I read there can be several reasons that the performance gain is only modest. The most likely is that the pcmcia card uses a 16 bit data bus, which cannot supply data fast enough to the tranceiver on the card.

Sound

The sound chip is an "ESS Maestro 2E". The correct kernel module is maestro.o . Choose the "maestro" driver when configuring a kernel. "modprobe maestro" is all that is needed to load the module by hand. To automatically load it, I add the line "maestro" to my file "/etc/modules".

The driver works pretty well, but I think it is only included in kernel 2.2.14 and later. There is sometimes some popping that may be associated with the new driver. I didn't try any advanced features.

Suspend to Disk Partition

I have experimented a bit with this and use it quite often. I am not sure what is essential to do it cleanly. If I pop out the PC card, go to a virtual console (say ctrl-alt-F1) and then suspend to disk, I can almost always restore cleanly by powering on and then popping the card in after restoring. You can then use ctrl-alt-F7 back to the X session.

High Speed Ports; USB and FireWire/IEEE 1394

I have tried to some of the development kernels (2.3.x) to see if these chips are supported and work. They seem to be, but I have not moved any data on these buses. Sager claims that the IEEE 1394 control chip is either the TSB 12LV22 or the TSB 41LV03. Checking Texas Instruments web pages, I find that one of these chips is obsolete and supports only 100MB/s, rather than 400 MB/s. I don't know which chip is actually in my machine.

These are some of the modules that I loaded to test the ports: ohci1394, ieee1394, usbcore, usb-uhci. Find the kernel configuration options that look like they would build modules with these names.

Hardware and Upgrading

Finding reliable information on notebook computers, even after you buy one, is quite difficult; moreso than for desktop computers. The companies involved do not want you to know who manufactures and who resells computers. Details on the hardware are also typically hard to obtain. It is nice to know these things. For instance, you can get more than one source for parts. The Kapok label was scraped off of the bottom of my unit, but not completley; "...POK COM..." is still visible. A "Sager" logo was glued to the top of the case. Other than that, the manufactuer and reseller are not marked on the case. The case has a solid, simple, and elegant design. It is not as loud and obnoxious as 'name-brand' notebooks. The user's manual makes reference neither to the manufacturer nor the reseller. The repair manual can be downloaded from the Kapok site, but only if you have a password that identifies you as a reseller. If anyone has any additional information, please send it to me.

The user's manual is reasonable, but lacks detail in a few places. I fill in some details here.

The CPU

The only option I had was to get a Pentium III. I looked quite a bit for benchmarks and data on the Pentium II/III and the Celeron, but ran into the sea of marketing fluff. Please correct me if the are errors in the following story. The pentium III differs from the pentium II only by the addtion of a set of "multi-media" instructions. Only a small amount of Winbloze software makes use of these instructions, which provide a small, but measurable performance increase. There is no linux software which makes use of these instructions. The Celeron also uses the same processor core (whatever that is) as the pentium II/III and pentium pro. The Celeron has a bad reputation because, for the first few years, it had no L2 cache. However, recently, an on-die cache was added. Its performance does not appear to be much different from a pentium II/III. Until recently, The pentium II/III's that were put in notebooks had no on-die cache and ran at a reduced bus speed. However, like all recent Pentium III notebooks, this one uses a 100 MHZ front side bus and has a CPU with an on-die cache. I got a 500 MHZ chip. All the press I read said that the "geyserville" slowing-down feature is enabled only for chips faster than 500MHZ; however, if I unplug the AC adaptor, the chip appears to slow to to 350 MHZ.

Replacing the CPU is easy and is meant to be done by the user. Getting the screws for the heat sink into the holes is tricky and requires patience; the right pair of tweezers helps. After removing the heat sink, you see a large flat screw head that locks the CPU in place. If you look closely, there is an "L" and an "O" position. These correpsond to locked and open. In the open position, the CPU can be inserted and removed with no force.

The Hard Drives

Apparantly, one can get any bare IDE drive of the correct size format and mount it in a removable bracket. This bracket then slips easily into the notebook. All of this is easily done by the user. Apparantly, the width and length of drives is the same in most notebooks (2.5 inch width). But the depth varies. The main drive bay on this notebook will accomodate at least a 9.5 mm drive. Toshiba makes a 12.5 mm 18 GB drive. Since I can't find a drive larger than 12 GB advertised for the primary drive, my guess is that the primary bay won't accomodate a 12.5 mm drive. Measuring the bracket shows that the space is marginal. Update: Fosa sells an 18 GB drive for the primary bay. Their site claims that the primary bay will hold a 12.7 mm drive. I don't know why others, such as Sager and ProStar choose to ship only the 12GB Toshiba and not the 18 GB Toshiba.

However, the floppy bay will take a second hard drive. It has more space, and resellers will sell the 18 GB Toshiba drive mounted in the second HDD bracket (which fits in the floppy bay). I don't know if the second HDD bay will also take the larger 25mm drives. (eg. IBM makes these)

Some places on the Sager web site say that the floppy bay on the Sager 3350 will accomodate a second HDD. But, at first, it did not appear on their list of accesories, and several of the sales and tech reps told me it does not exist (for a variety of strange reasons). But, about a week after I made my inquiries, the second hard drive appeared on their list of accesories.

Memory

There are two slots for memory modules. Everything I read claims a maximum capacity of 256 MB. I don't know the reasons for this limit. I can't find much information on what kind of memory should go in the slot. Generic 128 MB 100MHz SODIMMs are somewhat cheaper than memeory sold by the Kapok resellers, but I don't know how well they would work. (In general, accessories from Sager and Prostar seem to be competitivley priced.)

A few weeks ago, Kapok/Clevo was reorganizing its site and temporarily left some information on which memory would work in the machine without password protection. However, I neglected to copy it! All technical information on their site is now under lock and key.

Keyboard

The keyboard is made by Chicony. It is secured by two small latches. Hit the latches and lift the keyboard and the memory slots are immediatley accesible. The cable to the mainboard can be detached easily.

Display

This is a 14.1 inch 1024x768 TFT screen. About a year ago, TFT was high-end, it now appears to be standard. I like it. I would like higher resolution, like some of the most expensive name brand machines. Many 15.1 inch screens still only have 1024x768 resolution. Prostar sells replacement screens, but I don't know how easy they are to replace.

A couple of weeks after I got the machine, a pixel died. So far, I only notice one dead pixel. From what I read, this is a small number for a TFT display.

Updates

Finding what hardare will work with thee laptops can be difficult. There is an outdated official page from Clevo that claims it will accomodate a 850 MHz CPU. I guess it will take a 1 GHz cpu. This is the fastest processor that Intel will produce for this chipset (Intel 440BX AGP). These are mobile pentium III chips with 256 K cache and 100 MHz FSB, micro fc-pga 2 socket. Beware new mobile pentium-M III chips with 133 MHz FSB, 512K cache, they will not work. Vendors _frequently_ give wrong or conflicting information.

Memory. Older literature on this laptop (and some reseller tech support) claims a maximum of 256 MB is supported. The latest page I could find at Clevo now says 512MB. There are two slots and the 440 BX chipset supports a maximum of 256 MB per slot. The 440 BX only accepts low density memory (16x8 per chip not 32x8, or more generally, not 32x anything.) Low density 256 MB sodimms are about twice the price of the high density sodimms. The low density 256 MB sodimms will have 16 chips, 8 per side. ( I have seen 3 vendors show the wrong picture with an sodimm; even the box of one at best buy showed the wrong picture. You have to have it in your hand.) A couple of vendors on the web are very clear about the issue.

Ethernet NIC. I got cardbus NICs to work with good transfer rates (> 8 MB/s) The 3Com 3CXFE575BT works with the standard linux pcmcia package (xircom cardbus driver). The D-Link DFE-690TXD will soon be in the offical package. Here is something that works now.

Drives. Most notebooks drives are 9.5 mm now, so they will fit in either bay. Set the jumper on the drive in second bay to slave (device 1).