Linux on the PCG-SR7k/PCG-505

The Sony PCG-SR7k/PCG-505 laptop is a slick little beast that came out mid 90's. It sports a PIII/600 processor that could dynamically underclock itself to conserve battery life. The laptop comes with a 12" screen, 9gb HD and 128mb RAM. Closed, it's about the size and weight of two Wired magazines, which makes it excellent for travel and casual moving around.

It also includes a memory stick port, jog-shuttle dial, one USB port, one firewire port, and one PCMCIA slot.

What makes this a more challenging install is that the CD/DVDROM drive is a PCMCIA type, so if you want the network available while installing, you need to use a USB dongle of some sort. This can get problematic if (like me), you'll be using a PCMCIA WiFi? card once the install is complete, but the linux installer leaves the machine set up for only the USB dongle (if it supports it at all).

Quick and dirty notes on getting some kind of linux working on my Sony sr7k laptop with the Sony PCMCIA CDROM.

Most of the information I found about getting linux on this ancient laptop was pretty old. The Red Hat stuff was back in the Red Hat 6 days. There was mention of FreeBSD? and some folks have gotten Gentoo working on it as well. No real good documentation.

My SR7k has 256mb of RAM and I've replaced the hard disk with a 30gb Toshiba after the first one finally died. The Toshiba's nice and fast and quiet, but runs much hotter than the older drive. That's depressing, because it means it'll just die that much sooner.

My goal is to have a dual boot laptop with Windows XP Home and some version of Linux, with the intent that it'll actually run faster than XP for basic Firefox/Thunderbird applications (which is what 90% of this laptop's usage is). The only reason really to run XP is so I can run DVDProfiler, a DVD cataloging/lookup app. Yes, it's cool enough to warrant keeping an entire OS around for.

The only other fly in the ointment is that the laptop connects to the net through a NetGear? WG511 PCMCIA 802.11g card (made in China). My WiFi? setup uses a 128bit WEP key.

Installation

All of these were attempted from DVDs. The nice thing about the SR7k is that it's CD/DVDROM drive can boot from DVDs. One really non-obvious gotcha - to get the laptop to boot from the DVD, do NOT plug in the DVD's AC Adapter. Only the main laptop power should be plugged in. No idea why they did that, and it took me many hours of banging my head against the wall before I figured that one out (and it's not exactly called out in the manual, either).

Gentoo 2006.0 DVD

Used the liveCD 2006.0. Needed to use the following command to boot: gentoo ide2=0x180 nohotplug, I was able to get the graphical install. Even worked with my Logitech cordless laptop mouse that even Windows doesn't recognize without the Logitech drivers.

See below for notes on the nohotplug argument.

However, once it got down to actually installing, both the LiveCD? and Minimal CD installer would say "Setting root password" and pretty much die.

So much for Gentoo.

Debian 3.1r2 DVD

Didn't work. I've forgotten where it failed.

Knoppix 5.01 DVD

Knoppix will boot with the gentoo ide2=0x180 nopcmcia arguments. It recognizes the video and trackpad and is completely usable, except that it runs from the CD, which sort of defeats the purpose. TODO Investigate how one goes about installing Knoppix. Supposedly, it can be done, but th instructions weren't on page one and I was sick of reading.

Fedora FC4 DVD

So far, Fedora is getting the farthest on install. I booted with the argument linux ide2=0x180 nopcmcia nohotplug and am now to the installing packages point. Everything seems to be going smoothly.

Once past the first stage install, Fedora didn't recognize the LCD monitor, so it wanted to run in 800x600 mode. Setting it to Generic LCD 1024x768 in the 2nd stage setup screen worked fine.

Fedora FC5

I had no luck getting FC5 to work - apparently, there's some change in the kernel that breaks the disk driver module.

NoHotPlug? notes

So the first time I tried Knoppix, with a blank HD in the machine, it booted fine with just the knoppix ide2=0x180 nopcmcia argument. Then, I partitioned the blank HD and installed Windows XP. After that, I tried Gentoo. Gentoo would boot until it got to "Coldplugging pnp devices" and would stop there. The keyboard and mouse were still active, but nothing more. I then tried adding the nohotplug argument to the boot and it worked OK. After installing XP, I also tried Knoppix again and this time it also stopped at the "Coldplugging pnp devices" screen. I did not try it again with the nohotplug argument, but I'm guessing Windows XP set something in the BIOS somewhere deep that neither distribution likes.

Customization

This is based on Red Hat FC4, the distro I was able to get working.

Netgear WG511

I managed to get a WG511 v2 made in China on eBay for ~$10. The card uses Prism drivers, which are already compiled into the FC4 kernel. However, the drivers need access to the firmware off the card in order to work properly. I was able to download the firmware from http://prism54.org (I specifically needed the ISL3890 firmware, as indicated by the multiple "failed to load 'isl3890'" error messages in dmesg). The firmware goes by another name on prism54.org (check the site for a guide to what to download) I copied the firmware to /lib/firmware and renamed it to isl3890. After rebooting, things seemed to work almost OK, although I managed to completely thrash my settings by trying to create a new profile then deleting it.

I got to the point where I could not get the hardware listed in the Gnome tools, but was still able to access and enable it from the command line.