Installation

Here's the detailed procedure :

  • press Enter
  • press Enter
  • press Enter
  • press Enter
  • press Enter

Reboot, and voilà ! Nice, isn't it ? L'informatique, c'est magique !.

Well, it could have been like that if I did not need at all the Windows Installation (you never know...), and getting an internet connection did not need you to login on an HTTP captive portal. For the latter, I tried to send the POST data containing my login information directly with wget, but unfortunately, the version of that software included in the busybox was a bit restricted, and only accepted basic options. So, a net install would have been impossible for me, but fortunately, the most useful packages are present on the first CD.

partitioning

For the former (keeping Windows), it went in a pretty straight forward manner. I could easily shrink the NTFS partition from 120 GB to 15 (that should be way more than enough, I think...), and then let the debian installer decide how to partition the rest of the disk for me. It gave me 80GB for /home, 5GB for /usr (on my previous debian box, I only allocated 3GB, thinking that I would not keep that Debian installation for too long... That was 3 years and a half ago... and I still have not reinstalled it), 3GB for the swap, 3 for /var and 300MB for / . I thought that it was too much for the swap, so I shrinked it a bit, but the rest was fine, IMHO.

Then, Enter, Enter, Enter, I was asked to reboot, and I had a working system, with a GNOME Desktop environment. I must confess I was very impressed.

Hardware support

Wi-fi

Everythink is not pink, though. Wireless was not available out of the box. You have to aptitude install ipw3945d. And maybe also ipw3945-modules-2.6-amd64. But it may have been already present, I don't remember.

Sound support

Sound was not there also. The module snd_hda_intel corresponding to the audio chipset was there, fine. But it did not work. I run alsaconf, then I tried to play an mp3-file that was on an external harddisk (an iPod, which by the way was recognised automatically, autorunning rhythmbox !), and I had very weird result. Right channel was OK, but I had crissing ultrasonic (or almost) sound on the left channel. It worked like that for one file, and for the second, silence. After a bit of googling (your best friend!), and with the help from a friend that had the same laptop, I discovered that you had to add the following line in the /etc/modprobe.conf file :

options snd-hda-intel   single_cmd=1 model=laptop-eapd

And finally, for eye-candy, I aptitude install compiz to see if that worked. And... after enabling Composite in xorg.conf, it worked, and with no noticeable slowdown !

Energy

Concerning energy related stuffs, suspend and hibernate worked out of the box. Very good. CPU scaling, on the other hand, needed you to enable some modules to work. The following were added in /etc/modules

speedstep-centrino
cpufreq_ondemand
cpufreq_conservative
cpufreq_powersave
cpufreq_stats
cpufreq_userspace

Then the CPU could change its frequency, scaling down from 1,66GHz to 1GHz when it is not sollicited. However, it worked for only one core. Or at least it showed the status for only the first core.

BUT. One annoying thing. When trying to shutdown or reboot the computer. It crashed. In fact, when shuting down the X server (with Ctrl-alt-backspace), pouf ! Kernel error, panic, or whatever. Very very annoying.

sid installation

Soo. I decided to leave the stable release, etch, to the unstable, sid. %s/etch/sid/g in /etc/apt/sources.list. Then aptitude update and aptitude dist-upgrade. I think 400MB or so was downloaded. One cup of tea later. It was done. A 2.6.20 kernel was installed at the same time. Reboot. Crash (I was still with the old kernel). Boot. trying to shutdown the X server. Yay it worked !!

In /etc/modules, I had to replace speedstep-centrino which was shown as deprecated, for acpi-cpufreq. And then the frequency of the two cores were independently updated !

Dual head and xrandr

One last thing I wanted to try was connecting an external monitor to the VGA plug. Just pressing the Fn-F4 button was not enough. Logs shown that things were moving. But I still had blank screens... One googling later, I discovered that the new Intel xorg drivers implemented the RandR 1.2 protocol, enabling some nice stuffs. Just had to play with the xrandr tool. Using the command

xrandr --output VGA --auto

lighted the external LCD monitor to its native resolution, and I had an almost perfect clone mode (well, the screen of the laptot was then truncated, since its resolution is 1280x800 while the LCD's was 1280x1024). I wanted to try a xinerama/multihead/whatever setup, but unfortunately, that thing prevented me from doing it :

alung@isumi:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 1824, __maximum 1280 x 1280__

The total size could not exceed 1280x1280.

But these blog posts helped me a lot. In your /etc/X11/xorg.conf, you have to adjust the virtual size of the screen :

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics 
Controller"
        Monitor         "Écran générique"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                __Virtual         2048 2048__
        EndSubSection
EndSection

I could have set up to a larger resolution, so that I could decide to put the VGA screen to the left, or the right of the laptop screen. But a virtual size larger than 2048x2048 disables DRI (3D acceleration...). In this configuration, i could still put the LCD "above" the other screen, with this command :

xrandr --output VGA --auto --above LVDS

Quite a strange layout at the beginning, but you get used to it quite quickly.

Firefox and Flash

There is no Flash plugin for 64bit architectures. Not even in Windows. So no Youtube or Dailymotion, you would say ? No, there's a solution. You just have to install nspluginwrapper and ia-32-libs, download the flash plugin for linux from the Adobe website, and run

 nspluginwrapper -i /path/to/npplugin.so

And voilà! No complicated and scary chroot procedure!

Conclusion

So, to conclude: having full, open source, driver support of your hardware gives you awesome results! And the Debian Etch release is very good, especially the installer. Good work Debian ! However it still has some flaws, and some missing things. I will fill some bug reports soon, to improve that.