System specs:

Additional information can be found on the VOBIS pages.

Note:

The installation of the VOBIS Advanced S1 turned out to be very similar to the installation of the  NEC Versa SX . This page, provided by David Plaut, is therefore very usefull.

Configuration:

The machine is configured dual boot (lilo) to allow for

Preliminaries:

The machine I got was completely empty, and I had to install both Windows and Linux. I started off by booting Linux from the cdrom, and started the Linux installation.
I used Disk Druid to partition the disk and formatted the Linux partitions. I then later formatted the DOS partition (after which I had to reinstall Linux again). This is probably not the most convenient method; it seems to be easier to first partition DOS. But this is typically something that you do not want to redo once it works.

X windows

During the Linux  RH5.2 installation, forget about the X configuration, but do that after the installation is complete with Xconfigurator. The easiest is to nevertheless select the Trident Cyber9388 chipset during the installation, and to select the LCD monitor. But don not expect X-windows to work at this stage.

The Trident Cyber9388 driver does work under XFree86 version 3.3.3, but not on earlier versions. As this is not the default under the RedHat 5.2 distribution, I had to download this driver from the web. You need the SVGA driver rpm and the installation rpm.
I also downloaded the XF86Config file, from the page of David Plaut, mentioned above, on  "Linux on NEC Versa SX". This NEC machine seems anyhow to be very similar to the Vobis Advanced S1.

My personal (quickly out-of-date) config file and rpm packages are here:

Download these and install the rpm's by "rpm -Uvh XFree86-...". Put the XF86Config file in /etc/X11/. Typing startx will then hopefully start your X-session without any problems (it works fine for me).

The depth of the standard pixel display is set to 16 bits.

KDE

I can recommend anybody (who has more than 32 MB on his machine), to install KDE .

Save-to-file

As indicated in the pages of David, the save-to-file works once the ide-harddisk is set to block-write mode with

    hdparm -m 16 /dev/hda

This works for me, and can be added to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. Note all the warnings of hdparm (i.e. warnings about massive filesystem corruption).

I have difficulty to use the "save-to-file" option when Linux is in screen-save mode. After re-activating the notebook the display get stuck. The most stable way of using the save-to-file utility is to stop X (logout) before closing the notebook, and restart startx upon re-activating the notebook.

Sound

A temporarely solution to get sound on this notebook is to download the OSS from opensound. Choose the download page, and check the correct Linux version. The installation is trivial (I just allowed the installation program to modify whatever it wanted to), and allowes you get a bit of sound. To quote the corresponding readme file:

This is the first beta test version of the Maestro driver so problems are possible with some applications. Full duplex features are not supported yet. Audio recording is likely to work unreliably so using it is not recommended.

There is no wave table support in this version and there are no plans to include this feature to OSS in future.

I have no idea how long this licence will work. We'll see -- at least it's something--.

Network access via PCMCIA card

This topic is rather unrelated to the notebook iteself. I happen to have bought a Xircom XIR-CE3-100BTX/M 10/100 Mbps PCMCIA network card without thinking. Of course, as it happens, the card is not supported by Linux RH5.2, and I had to find out that these Xircom cards are not supported all together. So don't buy these Xircom cards!

Luckely I could change the card to a 3COM-3CCE589EC PCMCIA 10 Mbps card (well, I didn't really need the 100 Mbps connection anyway). This card is supported from pcmcia-cs-3.0.?, which however is not the default distribution for RH. This means that I had to download the version pcmcia-cs-3.0.9 from the PCMCIA Information Pages, and re-install the pcmcia package. The installation turned out to be pretty trivial, and all the standard settings for the configuration of this pakcage were correct. The card works right away, and `hot-swapping' the card is not a problem at all.

A very nice add-on to the laptop if you happen to live close to a ethernet connection point.

ToDo

There are many things that  remain to be installed or can be improved. Please let me know if you can help.

Stan Bentvelsen
  Last modified: Thur May 5 1999