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First impressions: SUSE Linux 9.0 on the HP XE4500 laptop

TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones
This is all very old stuff now. My preference now would be for FreeBSD 6.x, or Ubuntu / Kubuntu, or the latest version of SUSE/Novell Linux. So what follows here is just for historical reference. Really, if you use an old XE4500 laptop on a recent Linux or BSD distribution, everything should just work right out of the box anyway :-)

Date: 11 November 2003

Generally SUSE 9.0 is good news for owners of HP XE4500 machines. Just about everything is recognised and supported straight out of the box - no need to select devices by hand during installation.

These comments are based on SUSE 9.0 Professional. This is the bundle with one double-sided DVD, 5 CDs, and two printed manuals in the box. There is also a "Personal" edition for slightly less money, with slightly less in it.

What works and what doesn't?

Device Working? Comments
Screen Yes :-) No more flickering! Nice and fast in 2D. Slightly-improved XF86Config file here. Differences from YAST auto version: enables DRI for speed, and enables SW Cursor and 800x600 option for TV Out compatibility.
Ethernet Yes No problems.
Infrared Yes Sees my Nokia 8210
DVD movies Yes You'll need Libdvdcss - discussed in more detail below. This makes a nice multi-region DVD player, and of course you can skip through all the copyright notices and just play the movie you paid for!
TV Out Yes Use "atitvout" is on the SUSE DVD. See important hints here.
PCMCIA slots Yes Tested OK with SMC WLAN card
Modem Yes *** Bug in YAST, for fix please see below ***
USB Yes?? Detected, but not yet tested here.
Firewire Yes?? Detected, but not yet tested here.
CD Burning Yes?? "k3b" comes with SUSE, and it works well.
Trackpad Yes Even the trackpad on/off switch/LED! (HINT: switch out of X before hotplugging mice!)
Sound Yes *** Uses ARTSD in X, so make sure your apps are set for ARTSD, or they will be silent!
NTFS, SMB, NFS Yes They all work by default. No need for special kernel build like RedHat.
ACPI Battery Gauge Yes Tested OK over 2.5 hours at 1200 MHz. Gradual reduction in battery charge, then pop-up messages warning of very low battery state.
ACPI Processor Speed Yes The 'limit' and 'performance' options permit speed reduction from 1.6 to 1.2 GHz, as discussed in more detail below
ACPI Fan control No?? Perhaps the fan is always controlled by the BIOS. Once the fan turns on, it almost never turns off. Was it the same in Windows??

The installation is nice and easy, as it all runs from Side A of the DVD. There are multiple CDs for machines without DVD drives. I installed on top of my old WinXP/RedHat dual-boot installation. The XP dual-boot option was left intact, with the RedHat partition being completely overwritten - so back up your user files first! As you'd expect, SUSE 9.0 comes with recent versions of Mozilla, OpenOffice, Gimp, Evolution, AbiWord, Acrobat Reader, and other good stuff. A DTP package called Scribus is included. There's a lot of good stuff here.

You can install SUSE on as many PCs as you like - they *do* permit copying. They just prefer not to have ISO images on the net as it hits sales of their boxed package (perhaps that's where Red Hat went wrong). The SUSE 9.0 package is good value and deserves our support.

Some more random notes from my installation experience ;-)

*** Don't log in as root!

It's worth doing it properly and not logging in as root. SUSE have taken pains to ensure that things still work easily without being root. Make yourself a proper user account! The control centre and YAST will prompt you for the Root password when necessary, so you don't need to keep logging out and in again - sweet! One or two Control Centre or YAST dialogs don't always seem to work in this mode though. It might be worth trying "xhost +" if this happens, provided that your box is behind a firewall.

*** Library not found?

When running as root, the "wxWindows" library for "pgadmin3" would not build from the source tarball, because "./configure" could not find "gtk-config". But if you log in as a normal non-root user, then the default path is different, so the build works!! So again, don't be root!

I think you need to install "gtk-devel" for wxWindows-pgAdmin3 to build, so you might need to use the SUSE Control Centre to add gtk-devel if you didn't select it at installation time.

*** Hot-plugging Mice

You can switch between the trackpad and the PS/2 mouse connector, but you need to switch out of X first to avoid problems. CTRL/ALT/F1 (Hotplug) CTRL/ALT/F7

Modem (Conexant "hsflinmodem")

The SUSE 9.0 installer detected this and installed the driver, but there was no /dev/modem, and running "minicom" against /dev/ttyS0, S1, S2 didn't work! A quick grep revealed the problem: 

	# grep --with-filename hsf /var/log/YaST2/*
	...
	2log:2003-11-09 16:24:27 speedy(4947) [YCP] clients/inst_suseconfig.ycp(runStep):83 Executing 'HOME=/tmp/Ya
	ST2-04947-1aRs1T /sbin/SuSEconfig --verbose --module hsflinmodem >>/var/log/YaST2/y2log.SuSEconfig 2>&1'
	y2logRPM:km_hsflinmodem-5.03.03.L3mbsibeta02090500-134.i586.rpm installed ok
	y2logRPM:hsflinmodem-5.03.27mbsibeta02122600-92.i586.rpm installed ok
	y2log.SuSEconfig:Running module hsflinmodem only
	y2log.SuSEconfig:Executing /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.hsflinmodem...
	y2log.SuSEconfig:/sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.hsflinmodem: line 15: /sbin/hsfconfig: No such file or directory
So the installer didn't finish because /sbin/hsfconfig didn't exist. Well it turns out to be in /usr/sbin/hsfconfig, so with a little root action we can quickly fix it... 
	# whereis hsfconfig
	hsfconfig: /usr/sbin/hsfconfig
	# ln -s /usr/sbin/hsfconfig /sbin/hsfconfig
	# hsfconfig
	Linux HSF softmodem drivers, version 5.03.27mbsibeta02122600

	WARNING: this is an EXPERIMENTAL BETA VERSION of the HSF drivers for Linux.
	USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! See the file /usr/lib/hsf/LICENSE for details.

	Conexant Systems neither distributes nor maintains this package.
	PLEASE DO NOT CONTACT CONEXANT REGARDING THIS SOFTWARE!!!
	If you require assistance or need more information, go to:
              http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv

	Should we attempt to automatically configure your hardware? [yes]

	Selected PCI VendorID=10B9 DeviceID=5457
	and INF file /etc/hsf/inf/linux_ali_smartmc.inf

	Automatically guessed country (using timezone): "UK"

	Configuring modem for country: "UK"
	You can change this setting later with the command "hsfconfig --country"

	Your HSF modem should now be accessible as /dev/ttySHSF0

	# ln -s /dev/ttySHSF0 /dev/modem
You can use "minicom" to confirm that it's working: type "AT" and it should say "OK". Now, use the KDE Control Centre/YAST tool to set up your ISP details. Make sure KInternet is running in your KDE taskbar (the icon shows a little plug). Right-click on the plug and pick "Dial-In" to connect. It's all very easy: you even get an animated icon when data transfer is in progress, and you can see the log of dialling and PPP negotiation messages. You can then use email and web applications just as you'd expect. Finally, just right-click the icon and "Hang Up" to disconnect.

Power Management, CPU speed settings, fan, hard disk idle timeouts...

The ACPI begins to work reasonably well straight out of the box. You get an accurate battery charge display. But it sounds as if Suspend is unlikely to work until Linux 2.6, so I haven't tried it.

The CPU speed can be slowed down from 1600 MHz to 1200 MHz. This should reduce power consumption by 10 watts. Maybe we can make the system run cooler, to turn off the fan? Let's try interrogating the ACPI data in the kernel RAM /proc structure:- 

	# (First find out how fast we're running now)
	# procspeed
	1599.372792 MHz processor.

	# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
	state count:             2
	active state:            P0
	states:
		*P0:                 1600 MHz, 20000 mW, 250 uS
		P1:                  1200 MHz, 10000 mW, 250 uS

	# echo -n 1 >/proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance

	# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
	state count:             2
	active state:            P1
	states:
		P0:                  1600 MHz, 20000 mW, 250 uS
		*P1:                 1200 MHz, 10000 mW, 250 uS

	# procspeed
	1199.355428 MHz processor.
But, a few seconds after you set speed to 1200, it reverts to state 0 (1600 MHz)! So to set a fixed performance limit, use the following: 
	# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
	state count:             2
	active state:            P0
	states:
		*P0:                 1600 MHz, 20000 mW, 250 uS
		P1:                  1200 MHz, 10000 mW, 250 uS

	# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/limit
	active limit:            P0:T0
	platform limit:          P0:T0
	user limit:              P0:T0
	thermal limit:           P0:T0

	# echo "1:0" > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/limit

	# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/limit
	active limit:            P1:T0
	platform limit:          P0:T0
	user limit:              P1:T0
	thermal limit:           P0:T0

	# cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance
	state count:             2
	active state:            P1
	states:
		P0:                  1600 MHz, 20000 mW, 250 uS
		*P1:                 1200 MHz, 10000 mW, 250 uS
The /proc area is a kernel structure, not a real file system, so to select 1200 MHz every time you boot, you'll need to create a little script, say "/etc/init.d/cpuslow": 
	#!/bin/sh
	echo "1:0" >/proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/limit
Use the "Sys-V Init Editor" under "System/Service Configuration" to run this script at boot time. Remember to "chmod +x" the script file. Also set the screen-saver to "blank screen", otherwise power savings will be lost if a CPU-hungry screen saver kicks in.

On my system, things are definitely cooler at 1200 MHz, but once the fan comes on, it doesn't seem to switch off again. This might be a BIOS or ACPI problem. There are also some "thermal zone" parameters to look at: 

	# cd /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM

	# ls
	.  ..  cooling_mode  polling_frequency  state  temperature  trip_points

	# cat cooling_mode
	cooling mode:            active

	# cat polling_frequency
	<polling disabled>

	# cat state
	state:                   ok

	# cat temperature
	temperature:             50 C

	# cat trip_points
	critical (S5):           91 C
	passive:                 70 C: tc1=4 tc2=3 tsp=40 devices=0xc1c0f880
If you echo "0" or "1" to /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/cooling_mode, you can switch between "active" and "passive". But "passive" doesn't turn the fan off! It's all a bit annoying. If I leave the laptop switched off overnight, then with the CPU speed reduced to 1200 MHz, it takes 20 minutes before the fan comes on at about 50 C. But when the laptop is left idle, and the temperature falls to 46 C, the fan does not switch off. Maybe "trip_points" is writable? Anyone???

Update: This web page shows how it's supposed to work (thanks to Christopher Knoerle for sending me this URL). But nothing seems to happen when you write to "trip_points" on the XE4500, and /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state doesn't exist on the XE4500.

Footnote: At the risk of damaging the laptop, I left it running and stuck it in the freezer for a couple of minutes to see whether the fan went off! The answer is that the fan *did* switch off, and when retrieved, the CPU temperature was reading 42 C. This suggests to me that if we could change the trip points only slightly (say, fan on at 53 C, and off at 48 C) then the fan could safely stay off most of the time in normal use. If anyone finds a way to change the trip points, please get in touch! Of course, the greater mystery is why this thing runs so hot, when the CPU is 98% idle.

To make things run even cooler, you can set a spin-down timeout on the hard disk with 

	# hdparm -S 12 /dev/hda
	/dev/hda:
	setting standby to 12 (1 minutes)
You could add this command as a script in /etc/init.d , and enable it in the SysV Run Level Editor GUI.

There may be some silly little processes somewhere that will keep doing small things that make the disk spinning up and down all day (too early to be sure yet). But maybe we can switch off some unwanted processes so that the disk rest when the system is idle. The first things to switch off are "acpid" and "cpufreqd" - switch these off in the RunLevel Editor GUI, as they don't really do very much on this hardware as far as I can see. In particular, "acpid" is harmful because it receives Battery Status events a couple of times per minute, and logs them to /var/log/acpid, thus preventing the hard disk from spinning down.

CORRECTION! "acpid" does serve a purpose: it loads the kernel modules needed for ACPI functions. These are: "ac", "battery", "button", "fan", "processor", "thermal". Without "battery" the KDE battery life applet won't run, and without "processor" the CPU slow-down tweak discussed earlier won't work either. To fix this you may as well add these commands to your /etc/init.d script: 

	insmod ac
	insmod battery
	insmod fan
	insmod processor
	insmod thermal
before it tries to set the processor speed.

Infra-red support

The infra-red interface is auto-detected, but it's switched off by default to save power. It can be switched on with: 

	# rcirda start
Then use /dev/ircomm0 as the IRDA device.

For accessing GSM phones over IRDA, SUSE has included "Kandy" and "xgnokii". I didn't have any luck using those with my Nokia 8210 phone. But "gammu --backup phone.backup" worked very nicely, after creating ~/.gammurc as follows: 

	# cat >~/.gammurc
	[gammu]
	port = /dev/ircomm0
	connection = irda
Thanks to Scott Hazlehurst for pointing out gammu. You might need to run YAST to make sure it's installed, as it didn't seem to get installed by default on my system.

Efficient use of slow internet links

For those of us with slow internet links (I have 64K ISDN), there is a suggestion on the SUSE Portal website to reduce the TCP WindowSize on the default-gw route. The default is ~32Kbytes, and the suggestion is to use 8000 or 4000 on dialup links so that you get snappier web response when you have an FTP download in progress, for example. But the syntax has changed since SUSE 8.0: /etc/route.conf doesn't exist any more.

So, how to change TCP WindowSize in SUSE 9.0?

Manual way: 

	# route delete default gw
	# route add default-gw 192.168.0.1 window 4000
Automatic way: Create a file called /etc/sysconfig/network/ifroute-eth0 containing one line: 
	# cat >/etc/sysconfig/network/ifroute-eth0
	default 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 eth0 - window 4000
To test this, take the interface down with "ifdown eth0", then bring it up again with "ifup eth0". DO NOT use "ifconfig eth0 [down][up]" as this won't run the scripts! Use "route -en" to print the routing table including Window size. 
	# ifdown eth0
	# ifup eth0
	# route -en
	Kernel IP routing table
	Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
	192.168.0.0     *               255.255.255.0   U         0 0          0 eth0
	default         192.168.0.1	0.0.0.0         UG        0 4000       0 eth0

Wireless Networking support

I plugged an SMC2632W IEEE802.11b WLAN card into the PCMCIA slot, and it was recognised immediately. A little setting of parameters in YAST and it was working perfectly with WEP. There are two alternative places to set this stuff up: under Network Cards in YAST, or under "Profiles". In "Profiles" you can store several different configurations for different sites, but I haven't tried that.

One minor thing is that when switching from wired to wireless, I need to close down the wired interface and change the default route: 

	# ifdown eth0
	# route add default gw 192.168.1.0
It would be good to have scripts to install new routes when the WLAN card comes up. The SUSE 9.0 admin manual outlines this in Chapter 12. For my system, the wireless network runs on a different subnet, and again I want internet access to use a TCP receive window of 4000. So I've created another routing script: 
	# cat >/etc/sysconfig/network/ifroute-wlan-pcmcia
	192.168.0.0 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0
	default     192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 - - window 4000
The effect of this is that plugging in the WLAN card takes over all the routes (even if eth0 is still up): 
	# route -en
	Kernel IP routing table
	Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
	192.168.1.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U         0 0          0 wlan0
	192.168.0.0     192.168.1.1     255.255.255.0   UG        0 0          0 wlan0
	0.0.0.0         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG        0 4000       0 wlan0
That's quite nice as it makes the changeover to wireless automatically. But to go back to wired Ethernet, you need to unplug the wireless card, and say: 
	# ifdown eth0
	# ifup eth0
to bring back the normal routes.

*WARNING*. For some reason, if you use "ifdown eth0", the system starts responding very slowly. Under X, you can easily type too fast! Best is to keep eth0 up, but just route all the traffic away from it. (I wonder why this happens?)

TV-Out HOWTO

The XE4500 has a Radeon M6 LY video chipset, which supports TV Out via the yellow SVHS connector. To get it working:

XINE: DVD movie playback on SUSE 9.0

For legal reasons, SUSE 9.0 has included a version of Xine which will play DVB TS audio/video streams very nicely, but it's crippled so that it won't play DVDs. With legislation in both Europe and the USA now making it more risky for people to mirror libdvdcss, I felt it was worth trying to get DVD playback working while it's still possible.

Solution:

Troubleshooting XINE

The same goes for XMMS - it is set for the wrong sound system by default, so it won't work. Just set it to ARTS from the menu inside XMMS.

Getting "Popfile" going on SUSE 9.0

This is an excellent learning mail filter, good for both spam filtering and mail sorting. Being a POP3 proxy it is independent of the mail client you use. The latest PopFile is always at http://popfile.sourceforge.net.

I created a non-priviledged user to run it, and tested the following at the command line with a view to calling it from an rc.d file: 

	su nonpriv
	/usr/bin/perl popfile.pl
	POPFile Engine loading
    	Loading...
        	 {core: mq config logger}
	Can't locate BerkeleyDB.pm in @INC
The PopFile release notes reveal that the new release of Popfile needs the Perl module BerkeleyDB.pm from www.cpan.org. I found BerkeleyDB-0.25.tar.gz on Cpan, so I unzipped BerkeleyDB-0.25.tar.gz and followed build instructions: 
	perl Makefile.PL
        make
        make test
	su
	make install
The 'make' failed with "#error db.h is not for Berkeley DB at all." Solution: run YAST and install "db-devel-4.1.25" from the SUSE 9.0 DVD, then try again. OK... now BerkeleyDB-0.25.tar.gz installs OK. So back to POPFile: 
	perl popfile.pl
output...
	Couldn't start the pop3 proxy because POPFile could not bind to the
	listen port 110. This could be because there is another service
	using that port or because you do not have the right privileges on
	your system (On Unix systems this can happen if you are not root
	and the port you specified is less than 1024).
Solution: start as "perl popfile.pl -port 1110" to set the POP port number to listen on. Then set the same port number in Evolution.

Now, to make it start at boot as a non-priviledged user, create a user called popfile. User doesn't need to be able to log in. Save this script file to /etc/init.d/popfile and make it executable: 

	#!/bin/bash

	# Sample init.d/script to show how to start popfile
	# automatically during regular Redhat Linux 7.3 boot
	# Should also work for other versions of Linux

	# Change the line below to reflect the location of popfile.pl
	popfilelocation=/home/popfile/popfile.pl

	# You may want to do a "ls -l /bin/basename" and
	# a "ls -l /usr/bin/dirname" to confirm that you
	# have the two utilities on your linux system

	prog=`/bin/basename $popfilelocation`
	dir=`/usr/bin/dirname $popfilelocation`

	case "$1" in
	start)
	cd $dir
	/bin/su - popfile -c "perl ./$prog -port 1110 >> /dev/null 2>&1 &"
	pid=`ps -ef | grep "perl \./popfile\.pl" | gawk '{print $2}'`
	if [ ! -z $pid ];then
	echo "Starting POPFile Service - OK"
	else
	echo "Starting POPFile Service - ERROR?"
	fi
	;;
	stop)
	pid=`ps -ef | grep "perl \./popfile\.pl" | gawk '{print $2}'`
	kill $pid
	pid=`ps -ef | grep "perl \./popfile\.pl" | gawk '{print $2}'`
	if [ -z $pid ];then
	echo "Stopping POPFile Service - OK"
	else
	echo "Stopping POPFile Service - ERROR?"
	fi
	;;
	status)
	pid=`ps -ef | grep "perl \./popfile\.pl" | gawk '{print $2}'`
	if [ -z $pid ]; then
	echo "POPFile is not running"
	else
	echo "POPFile is running. PID ($pid)"
	fi
	;;
	*)
	echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|status}"
	exit 1
	;;
	esac

	exit 0
To get this script to run automatically at boot time, either create the required symlinks manually, or use the KDE SysV runlevel editor to create "S" and "K" symlinks for runlevels 3 and 5. (Could probably get away with just level 5, but may as well run in 3 too.)

There's a section on Runlevels and Init Scripts in the SUSE 9.0 Admin Guide, which suggests starting from /etc/init.d/skeleton as the basis of such a script. That's cleaner I suppose.

11 November 2003

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