This document describes my currently installed system. Older versions of the document are available and should also be consulted. I will try to keep this one up to date but I will "forget" things. Please so the older ones for more complete information.
The MS-1013 is sold in a number of forms and often goes under the name Megabook S270. This hardware is also sold as a barebones system which is rather rare or laptops. It is the only laptop I found with an AMD64 CPU and a 12 inch screen.
As of January 2006 there are many online retailers that will allow you to customize your laptop. I purchased mine from AVADirect and have been happy with it so far. Besides picking all the components you can also pick the OS you want. In my case that was none! RedHat was an inexpensive option and, though I don't want to use it, in retrospect it probably would have helped having a working configuration on the machine to look at while trying to get some things working. In the end it wasn't necessary, it may have sped things up a little though.
The information provided here is a collection of things I learned/discovered while getting this laptop working. Although I try to provide all the relevant details I do not provide a step by step guide.
I have recently upgraded to Ubuntu 6.06, "Dapper Dan", AMD64 variant on the machine. Roughly speaking everything works and the upgrade was trivial. Roughly since I haven't tested everything and there are still some tweaks necessary to get some things working. In the end I find them rather minor and I have been impressed that a relatively new laptop in 64bit mode works so flawlessly so easily. Given struggles I've had with other laptops I was quite shocked by this. I chose Ubuntu because I have been using Debian for awhile now and like it. Ubuntu releases branches from Debian unstable frequently thus creating a stable system with more up to date software.
In this system is the following hardware:
MS-1013 Turion64 Ultraportable Series Laptop, 12.1" WXGA LCD, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M Graphics AMD, Turion 64 MT-34 1.8GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 25W DDR400, 1GB DDR 400MHz PC-3200 SDRAM SODIMM, Non-ECC FUJITSU, 80GB MHT2080AH, 5400-RPM, 8MB cache, 9.5mm, EIDE MICROSTAR, MP54GBT2 Combo Wireless-G + Bluetooth Adapter, IEEE 802.11b/g 11/54Mbps, MiniPCI (for MSI n/b only)
For gory details you can view the lspci -v and /proc/cpuinfo output.
As noted above almost everything on the laptop just works in the default Ubuntu install. Everything that I have tried works after some tweaks. Here is a brief summary of the tweaks. More details are given below.
fglrx
driver which allows for 3D acceleration and which
comes with Dapper as xorg-driver-fglrx
. A minor 64-bit
problem seems to exist. See below for details.
noapic
and/or nolapic
may still be a good
idea.
For the configuration described here I am using BIOS version 4.30 which was the latest as of 10 January 2006. I upgraded this from 4.10 which had been on the machine. You can find more information from MSI. Be aware that there are two versions of the BIOS, a 6.x series and a 4.x series. Please carefully read their information to determine whether you have the RS480 or RS482 chipset.
Note that to upgrade your bios you can boot from a USB flash drive.
The MS-1013 will only show this boot option in the BIOS boot menu
if the USB drive is plugged in at boot and if it has a
bootable image on it. Under Linux
I just used
dd
to write such an image to the drive. You can find
images in lots of places including Bootdisk.Com. Make sure you copy
the new bios and flash utility to the drive before you reboot.
The CPU speed is controlled by powernowd
. The default
mode is to run at the lowest speed (lowest power consumption) when
the machine is idle, to step it up as demand increases, and to step
it back down as demand lessens. Some of this can be controlled by
configuring powernowd
, see its manpage for more
details. This is installed and run by default.
There are two options for driving the video display. The first is
to use the open source driver (installed by default). The second
is to install the proprietary driver. You may also want to read
about my DVD playing experiences when decided
which driver to use. I have chosen to just use the
fglrx
driver. If you want more information on other
drivers see my old Breezy page.
fglrx
Driver
ATI does release a binary only driver that works with this card.
You can install different versions of this. If you want to install
the fglrx
driver you should read the Ubuntu
Howto.
I have installed the prebuilt package that comes with Dapper: just
apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
. See the line above
for more details.
This is great but there are a few problems. Firstly, running
fglrxinfo
or glxinfo
gave me a
Badalloc
error. That is, I was getting no GLX! To
fix this I found running env LIBGL_DEBUG=1 glxinfo
to
be instructive. It wasn't finding the dri
library it
needed! To fix this:
cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules ln -s /usr/lib/dri
Hopefully this won't be needed in the fugure.
Unfortunately using dri
might lock up your machine. I
have experienced some lockups and I don't know why. Online
searches have turned up complaints about fglrx
,
dri
, and lockups. It isn't obvious to me that this is
my problem. I'm still exploring other options such as mixing
noapic
and nolapic
options at boot.
The sound card is supported by alsa using the snd_atiixp
It worked without further configuration from me. Note that you
also have to make sure that the External Amplifier
is
turned on. You can check this with alsamixer
, for
example. I believe it was for me but I don't remember.
The miniPCI card includes a Ralink RT2500 WLAN device. This is
supported without changes by an opensource driver. The device name
is ra0
.
I have verified that the miniPCI card installed is the MP54GBT2
(aka MS6533B). This contains bluetooth. The vendor claims it was
tested under windows and worked (I have no way of confirming this).
I have not been able to get it to work under Linux. The
expectation is that it should be controlled by the
hci-usb
module (that is, the bluetooth is implemented
as a usb device). However I see no new usb device when I load this
module. I have found a report with working
bluetooth. I'm not sure if this is the same device as I have.
No tweaks were made to acpi. The email
and
web
buttons work by default (using your gnome
preferences for your email client and web browser). The "wireless"
button toggles the wireless LED (on the bottom, furthest to the
right) but doesn't do anything else. It does not generate
an acpi keycode so it is not handled by the acpi system. I don't
know how to check the state of the LED. Using
setkeycodes
you can cause it to generate a keycode
that can be assigned to a task (through a gnome keybinding, for
example) though I haven't done this. The last button for bluetooth
does nothing. I thought it was suppose to change the color of the
wireless LED to indicate that bluetooth was active. This concerns
me a little as there were some mini PCI cards that were originally
shipped with the MS-1013 that were suppose to include bluetooth
support but they didn't work with the motherboard. Again it isn't
controlled by acpi but a key binding can be assigned to it.
Works with no changes. This includes scrolling. It is controlled
by the xorg-driver-synaptics
package, I think, which was
installed by default for me.
Both suspend (to RAM) and hibernate (to disk) work using the built in software suspend.
By default suspend (to RAM) isn't turned on. Edit
/etc/default/acpi-support
and uncomment the
ACPI_SLEEP=true
line. After this when you login to
gnome the logout options will include both Suspend and Hibernate.
Works with no changes. This includes highspeed USB2.0 devices.
Works. I found for my external hard drive I had to turn it on first, then plug in the firewire otherwise it wasn't reliably detected/automounted.
Hmm, so, there does appear to be a modem in the machine. This means I haven't looked at it. I haven't even considered looking at it. I expect it requires some proprietary driver. I have no reason to test it and expect I won't.
There are many other things I have done in configuring this laptop/Ubuntu. Not everything is ideal but I'm continually surprised by how many things work and how well.
There are a few proprietary programs that don't work in 64bit mode.
This includes Acrobat Reader and Flash (with Firefox). This can be
solved by running these programs in a 32bit environment. Setting
up a 32bit environment isn't hard. Information can be found in the
Ubuntu
Forums. Note that the link here is a little old, it applies to
Ubuntu 5.04, not Ubuntu 5.10, but the Howto can be followed with
small changes. This has proven useful to me for
mplayer
as many of the codecs are 32bit only.
Playing DVDs works great on this laptop, however, some
configuration is needed. This includes both the dvd device and the
video driver choice. For the player I use totem
. I
would expect any of the many other choices (gxine
,
mplayer
, ogle
, vlc
, etc.) to
work fine too. It is necessary to install the
libdvdcss2
package, and follow its instructions, to
play encrypted dvds that you have legally obtained and legally want
to view (yes, it is a shame that one must still go through
this step).
I don't know if this was necessary but the cdrom device is untuned
for performance so I tweaked this. I am currently using the
options suggested in /etc/hdparm.conf
. In that file I
have
/dev/cdrom { dma = on interrupt_unmask = on io32_support = 0 }
This has not been updated. I haven't tried playing a dvd yet!
To play dvds in full screen mode I found it necessary to have a
video driver with DRI
turned on. Without this video
update lagged the sound and was choppy. For me this means using
the latest fglrx
proprietary driver as noted above in
the Video Driver section.
$Id: dapper.html,v 1.1 2007/01/11 01:05:40 craig Exp $