Linux on the Pico Envoy Laptop

Bios and Windows notes

• The bios is Pheonix 4.0 Release 6, pretty minimal. For example, there is no way of disabling the power on memory test, or skipping it by pressing "esc". So on a 128M machine, thats a little irritating.

• The power on button is a little strange, it needs pressing for just the right amount of time: <~20ms causes a curious up-then-down behaviour, >1 sec turns it off again. Commonly in our experience the machine fails to boot properly and needs another go. If caught inadvertantly, it powers the machine down immediately, which can be a bit unfortunate.

• The IDE floppy/zip port has problems; with the zip in, the machine stalls at boot, needing an resume to continue. This behaviour varies depending on when you last had the floppy module in.

• Under win98, you should know that pico have some additional setup you need to get the machine to run acceptably (i.e. less than 8 mins to boot). On the supplied machines there's a directory c:\erd which is not supplied on cd or floppies. If you reinstall win, then you must run the erd executable in that directory (which you'll need to have preserved yourself), immediately after installing win. If you dont the behaviour of the system at boot is very poor.
  I've no idea what will happen if you subsequently want to install a newer version of win.

• We have failed to make the "save state to disk and power down" facility function usably. This could in part be due to bouncing of the on/off switch.

Linux

• X is as always, the bugbear. In this case, the ragepro-lt graphics card isnt currently supprted (as of mid 99) by the Mach64 driver with XFree.
  Fortunately, the dell inspiron 7000 has the same card, so the advice offered for that works in many respects. It can be found here. We have X working using the linux virtual frame buffer driver mentioned as the second method to try for getting X working on the Inspiron. That works fine for 2D, but there is as yet no 3D acceleration for that card. (so mesa, the opengl work-alike, doesnt benefit from it).
  The hope is that the next generation of X, which is in beta, will permit 3D acceleration on the RageProLT, in which case these will be quite impressive 3D laptops.
  You will need to follow the advice on the Dell Inspiron page for compiling your own kernel sooner or later, as the inspiron doesnt have the atapi floppy/zip, so you'll need to roll your own kernel setup when you want to include that.
• The sound card is the same as the inspiron too, and the advice there is that this is not currently supported in any linux driver. So, no sound as yet.

• The IDE ZIP suffers from the redhat 6.0 zip driver bug, so writing to it will trash the files you are writing to. A fix has been published recently: either upgrade your kernel, or use the ide-scsi module to access the zip. We have done the latter, though need to integrate that into the boot process. Details of the fix can be found via the redhat bugzilla bug tracking system.

• Ethernet. This works fine out of the box under linux, using the pico ethernet pcmcia card. However I've failed to get it working properly under windows as yet.
• Our biggest problem is that linux engages a power saving feature which reduces the processor clock by about 5:1. This kicks in at random and doesnt come out of it. It happens with, or without X, so seems fundamental. A benchmark loop goes from ~1.5 seconds to ~10 seconds, and the machine becomes pretty unusable. The only cure found to date is to completely disable APM (Advanced Power Management) in the kernel - we have tried most combinations of APM tweaks to no avail. Disabling APM completely, means that the machine burns power whilst idling - so you get the fan too - and renders the battery monitor inoperable. Disabling APM also means that the supplied pcmcia software does not work, as it makes calls on apm routines. Perhaps its possible to recompile the pcmcia software without that dependency.
  So until we find an acceptable fix for the clock speed problem, the machine is pretty much useless for using linux under batteries. Its ok under mains power if you dont mind the fan being on and a hot machine.