Installing Linux on your Clevo 5600

Introduction

I bought my Promedion 5600 from De Laptopper here in the Netherlands. For the Dutch readers, I can highly recommend De Laptopper. Their prices are good, they're very professional and always willing to answer one's questions.

The Promedion 5600 is the Dutch rebranding of the Clevo 5600. This laptop is also sold on the American continent as the Sager NP65xx, the M-Tech 5600, the Eurocom Monte Carlo 5600, the ProStar 5694, the Fosa 5600P and the much-discussed Alienware Area-51m gaming laptop.

My laptop has the desktop P4 2GHz (Northwood, 512K L2), 256MB DDR RAM, 15'' SXGA+ (1400x1050) LCD, DVD ROM, 3-year on-site guarantee and all the other bells and whistles that come with these computers. At the time I bought it, it was an impressive laptop :)

This document describes the necessary steps to get linux running on this machine with all possible functionality. I work and play in a 100% Winblows-free environment, so I can't quickly boot back into XP to do this or that. Even the thought makes me nauseous.

I update this howto periodically. When I bought my laptop, I started out with kernel 2.4.18 and some odds and ends. Things have improved greatly since that time with regards to linux support of this machine.

BIOS

Upgrade your BIOS (system and keyboard) to the latest available version. Remember to enable both C2 and C3 processor states in the advanced configuration.

Distribution

Gentlemen prefer Debian, so my laptop runs testing (sarge). You may of course install some other less l33t distribution. I hear very good things about Mandrake's out of the box support of laptops.

The Kernel

You have to do some work with your kernel to get more out of this notebook. At the moment, I'm running 2.4.21-pre3 with various patches.

After having untarred your kernel, get the latest ACPI patch from the SourceForge ACPI project page and the latest swsusp patch for your ACPI and kernel from the sourceforge swsusp pages. I am using the 20030109 acpi patch for kernel 2.4.21-pre3 followed by the v16 swsusp patch for that kernel and acpi combination.

If you're going to run a pre-2.4.20 kernel, also get the agpgart i845 resume patch from my site.

The ACPI patch will enable most of the advanced power and configuration capabilities of your laptop. The swsusp patch will enable you to suspend to disc (hibernate).

Patch your kernel source with these and then start configuring. To save you some time, you could start from my kernel config.

This has support for the onboard sound (tested), PCMCIA (tested), firewire (not tested), USB (not tested) and most of the other gimmicks.

XFree86

Read my dri_resume page. The page documents and makes available code changes that I made to XFree86. These changes enable suspend to disc from 3D accelerated X even with running 3D applications. Install either the binary drivers or build your own XFree86 according to the dri_resume page.

Also get the latest Synaptics touch pad drivers from Mobilix pages and install these according to the instructions.

Work from my XF86Config-4 to configure your XFree86.

Start X (I use startx for this) and check your DRI setup by running glxinfo. It should report that direct rendering is active. glxgears should yield more than 1000 FPS.

If you've been following the development of the XFree86 Radeon drivers, you will also note that you can now even switch VTs. Well, that's because I fixed the long-standing (months?) VT-switch bug in all versions of XFree86 with the help of Michel Dänzer and Mike Harris a week after I bought my laptop. Neat huh?

Power management

If you've configured your kernel and XFree86 like I recommend above, your power management should be more or less working. Please install acpid: this will enable you to trap and react on ACPI events, such as the closing of the lid and a press of the power button.

I have configured acpid to perform a shutdown if the lid is closed or the power button is pressed. If the sleep button combination is pressed (Fn-F4) acpid runs my my suspend.sh script.

The ACPI patches also supply all kinds of neat information via the /proc/acpi interface. For example, you can monitor the internal temperature of the CPU, your battery capacity (doh) and you can even throttle your CPU, making it consume far less power. Make sure that your CPU is making use of the C3 idle state by checking /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/power. This made a huge difference for me with regards to temperature and battery life.

Odd bits

This section contains other handy little things you can do to make life on your laptop even more comfortable.

Temperature/Battery info in the Bash prompt

Add the following to your .bash_profile or .bashrc. Make sure you test for interactivity in the latter case (by for instance checking for the existence of PS1):

# be very careful with ', " and \... you want bash to evaluate things
# at prompt display time and not before.  "" is expanded, '' is not.
if [ "$TERM" == "rxvt" -o "$TERM" == "xterm" ]; then
 PROMPT_COMMAND=\
 "echo -ne \"\033]0;\$USER@\$HOSTNAME: \$PWD\007\" && \
  TEMP=\`cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature | \
         awk '{ print \$2 }'\` && \
  BAT=\`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state | \
        awk '/remaining/ { print \$3 }'\` && \
  PS1='\$TEMP \$BAT \u@\h:\w\$ '"
else
 PROMPT_COMMAND=\
 "TEMP=\`cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature | \
         awk '{ print \$2 }'\` && \
  BAT=\`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state | \
        awk '/remaining/ { print \$3 }'\` && \
  PS1='\$TEMP \$BAT \u@\h:\w\$ '"
fi

This will prepend the current CPU temperature (in degrees Celsius) and remaining battery capacity (in mAh) to your bash prompt. In addition, if you're running an xterm or rxvt, it will continuously change the title bar to reflect your user, hostname and directory.

GKrellM gkacpi patch

I use GKrellM to keep an eye on status info whilst in X. There is also a plugin for monitoring ACPI battery and temperature info: gkacpi.

The current version (0.3) does not work with the latest ACPI kernel patches due to updates made to the /proc naming scheme. I have made the necessary fixes so you can just apply this patch.

Links

It turns out there is at least one other Linux-using Clevo5600 owner. Peter Österlund has some more useful information that he makes available on his Best 5650 page. This includes information on the built-in modem and the extra hotkeys.

Conclusions

This laptop is lovely. It's big and heavy, but then again it easily kicks (current) desktop ass. When coding and compiling (kernels and what not) my battery lasts between 1.5 and 2 hours. This is with the use of C3, but without throttling. When you're just sitting hacking code though, you might be able to extend this even further by setting a severe throttle on the P4.

About this document ...

Installing Linux on your Clevo 5600

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2K.1beta (1.48)

The command line arguments were:
latex2html -local_icons -split 0 clevo5600_linux.tex

The translation was initiated by Charl P. Botha on 2003-02-02

Charl P. Botha 2003-02-02