I provide here some notes regarding Linux on the NEC Versa P520. These notes are probably incomplete, because I've probably forgotten a step or two. Please email me if you have any questions. Also, you may want to check other Linux laptop sites, including this German Linux Wiki site and Linux on Laptops (our site is found here).
These notes may be useful for other laptops, too. In particular, if you are using a laptop with 1400 x 1050 resolution monitor and an Intel video card, then you may want to check out the Video Card section. I see by my logs that a number of my hits come from Google users with search terms "855GM" and "1400 x 1050". If you came to this page looking for information on a different laptop, check here and see if I have any specific information regarding your machine. If not, then please let me know what make and model your laptop is, how the manufacturer replied to your requests for a Video BIOS update (if appropriate) and whether the NEC Video BIOS workaround I mention below works for your laptop. I'll update this page as information comes in.
If you're interested in purchasing a laptop for Linux, I would caution against an NEC product. NEC has never satisfactorily replied to requests for fixes for a broken VBIOS. As far as they are concerned, if it works on the latest MS Windows, then it isn't broken.
Note that NEC does not claim to support Linux, although so far, their help desk has been friendly enough. But if you go with Linux, you should consider that you're on your own. This laptop has been put together for Windows XP and no other operating system. Of course, few OEMs support Linux, so this is nothing new. But the point is that here, we have a Video BIOS which is badly configured by any reasonable evaluation and NEC is reluctant to fix it.
Just ask yourself: Do I want to purchase a laptop from a manufacturer who believes that, if it works with Windows XP, then it is not mis-configured?
My employer (the Technical University of Eindhoven) provided me with this laptop, with Windows 2000 (not XP) pre-installed and configured. I don't use Windows, but I originally chose to set it up as a dual-boot, just in case I needed Windows to do my job.
I have used Slackware for several years now (since 1996), and so I chose to install Slackware 9.0 on the laptop. Slackware's second ("extras") disk contains parted, a tool for resizing existing partitions. However, it doesn't know what to do with ntfs partitions, which is what Windows 2000 uses. Instead, I found ntfsresize, a handy tool which did the trick.
The employer had devoted the whole 40 gigabyte hard drive to two equally sized Windows partitions. Ntfsresize shrunk these partitions to 5 gigabytes each, but no further. That means that I still had 1/4 of the hard disk devoted to Windows at present. Too bad. Still, the disk is pretty damn big, so I chose to ignore that wasted space for a while.
I used fdisk to create /, /usr,
/usr/local and /home
partitions. You may prefer to have just one root partition.
One advantage of multiple partitions is that if your hard drive
goes screwy and you lose an entire partition, you may still find
the others salvageable. This has happened to me recently. On
the other hand, guessing the correct size of each partition can
be difficult and maybe the hassle isn't worth the slight
increase in safety that multiple partitions provide.
When I installed Slackware 9.0, I chose a full install. What
the heck, might as well use the hard drive.
The video card
Let's start with the greatest source of frustration here. The LCD on this laptop uses 1400 x 1050 resolution. The onboard video card (which uses the i855 chipset) does not report that it can use this resolution at all. The result: X must use 1280x1024 resolution on a 1400 x 1050 monitor. This gives horizontal bands of fuzziness and is hard on the eyes. The difference with Windows appearance on the same LCD is striking (but there is a fix).
Note: I don't really know diddly about video cards and XFree86. The description that follows is what I've learned while tussling with this laptop. I recommend that users search for help from the devel@xfree86 or Dri-users mailing lists.
From what I understand, Linux drivers (including Intel's own release, found here) query the BIOS of the card for its resolutions. The Windows drivers do not rely on the card's BIOS but directly set the resolution appropriately. Intel has not given the means to do this, either with their own driver or by providing the technical details to the open source community. Therefore, X can only use the modes the card reports, and this does not include the resolution of the LCD.
First, just start X without any window manager (type
X, instead of startx, for instance).
This will ensure that you see the plain stippled background. If
your laptop is like mine, there will be easily visible horizontal
bands of fuzzy stippling. ("Do you like stippling?" "I don't
know. I've never stippled.")
Alternatively, check out the logs, probably found at
/var/log/XFree86.0.log. In the following snippet,
you see that my monitor is 1400 x 1050.
(II) I810(0): 2 display pipes available.
(II) I810(0): Display Info: CRT: attached: FALSE, present: TRUE, size: (0,0)
(II) I810(0): Display Info: TV: attached: FALSE, present: FALSE, size: (0,0)
(II) I810(0): Display Info: DFP (digital flat panel): attached: FALSE, present: FALSE, size: (0,0)
(II) I810(0): Display Info: LFP (local flat panel): attached: TRUE, present: TRUE, size: (1400,1050)
(II) I810(0): Display Info: TV2 (second TV): attached: FALSE, present: FALSE, size: (0,0)
(II) I810(0): Display Info: DFP2 (second digital flat panel): attached: FALSE, present: FALSE, size: (0,0)
(II) I810(0): Size of device LFP (local flat panel) is 1400 x 1050
(II) I810(0): No active displays on Pipe A.
(II) I810(0): Currently active displays on Pipe B:
(II) I810(0): LFP (local flat panel)
(II) I810(0): Lowest common panel size for pipe B is 1400 x 1050
(II) I810(0): Will use BIOS call 0x5f05 to set refresh rates for CRTs.
(II) I810(0): Will use BIOS call 0x5f64 to enable displays.
(--) I810(0): Maximum space available for video modes: 8000 kByte
Mode: 30 (640x480)
ModeAttributes: 0x9b
WinAAttributes: 0x7
WinBAttributes: 0x0
WinGranularity: 64
Mode: 34 (1024x768)
i855,
i810 or other chipsets. Some of these laptops are discussed
below. Also, see this
discussion on the xfree86 xpert mailing
list.
Petric Frank told me about 855resolution, a fix
for the VBIOS limitations of i855 cards. This fix
is still experimental, but works great for me. Thanks to Alain
Poirier for this.
The instructions for 855resolution can be found at
that page, but there is one important step not mentioned there.
Version 0.2 gives an error message when installed as is.
Try running "855resolution -l". If you see the
error message
Unknow VBIOS structure 855resolution.c to read
*bios_type = 0; Explicitly: change that
value of -1 to 0. Then everything works just peachy, at least
for me. Thanks again to Petric for that fix.
Once you have "855resolution -l" working without
any error, then add the following lines to
/etc/rc.d/rc.local.
echo "855 resolution fix"If you're not using Slackware, then maybe
/usr/sbin/855resolution 4d 1400 1050
/etc/rc.d/rc.local isn't the right file to edit.
Sorry, I know only Slackware.
If you are having similar problems with an i810 or
i815, then you might want to look into the
i810fb module, which comes with the 2.6.6 kernel.
This framebuffer module allows one to force the video card into
a resolution which is not reported in the BIOS. Check out the
Sourceforge project
page for this module.
If you can't get 855resolution to work for you,
then poke around your BIOS at boot time. Koen Vossen pointed
out that the NEC Versa P520 has a BIOS setting not to
stretch the display to fit the LCD. It's the stretching that
causes the fuzzy display. You can edit the setting by hitting
F2 at boot time, while the ugly-ass NEC splash
screen is showing.
If you disable the stretching, then your 1280 x 1024
resolution will be displayed in the center of the LCD with black
bands around the border. Not perfect, but workable. I used
this for months before 855resolution was
available. With the NEC Versa P520, you can even change whether
the image is stretched or not while the laptop is running. Hit
CTRL-ALT-F5 to toggle stretching.
(In fact, Koen discovered the BIOS entry after accidentally
discovering the toggle. When running X, CTRL-ALT-F5
switches to virtual console 5. This laptop has hijacked those
keys to instead change the behavior of the LCD (hit it twice
without letting up on the CTRL-ALT keys to go to
virtual console 5). No one in NEC apparently remembers this
feature either -- at least no one I talked to.)
Here's my
XF86Config file, found in /etc/X11 on
Slackware.
Alain Poirier's work for his Dell 510m provides a solution for the Acer. Thanks again to Petric for this information and of course to Alain for his workaround.
Petric has provided a Wiki entry for the 661LCi at this site. Other laptops are discussed there, too, but the site is in German. See also this site.
If your laptop is not listed above and you've confirmed that it has the same video problems I've discussed here, drop me a line. I'll list your laptop here so that others can find this information more easily via Google.
So, the resolution is a bit of a problem. What about the rest of the laptop? How's it work? Pretty well. No real complaints.
There were no configuration issues regarding the
sound card. Slackware did everything for me, so that I had
sound support on the first boot. The loaded modules are
i810_audio and ac97_codec.
Subsequently, however, a serious problem arose.
I've found that
sometimes I have no sound on
boot-up. Worse, sometimes when I have sound at bootup, I later
lose it. I see the following entry in
/var/log/syslog:
Nov 2 21:53:48 euclid kernel: ALSA intel8x0.c:599:
codec_read 0: semaphore is not ready for register 0x32
As far as I can tell, all of the drivers are loaded.
A reboot usually fixes the problem.
If anyone else sees similar behavior or, better, has a fix
for it, let me know.
The problem does not seem to be related to Linux.
I have gone back to the OSS modules, and also gone to the latest
ALSA modules, the 2.6 kernel, everything I can think of. The
problem has not gone away.
Some time before I noticed the problem, I had "upgraded" my BIOS, using a BIOS found at their site. I don't know if that's relevant at all. NEC insists that the BIOS on their site is the same BIOS that was put on the machine (although, months ago they told me it was an upgrade which might solve the VBIOS problem). Koen Vossen reports that he has similar experiences. He flashed his BIOS with the same file as I used and then started experiencing semaphore errors.
I don't know the source of the error for sure, but maybe it's a hardware error. I have returned my laptop to my employer for repair a couple of times. This has included installation of a new sound card. Right now, my employer says that they can't recreate the bug in Windows and NEC won't do anything more to repair it. However, since the loaner laptops they have given me work with exactly the same Slackware 9.1 distribution and exactly the same configuration, I don't view this as a Linux issue. It must be either a hardware or firmware issue, as near as I can figure. Just to be sure, I did something that I have never done before: I reinstalled Linux. Naturally, the problem remained.
You don't solve problems by reinstalling Linux. Maybe you solve problems by reinstalling Windows (at least, for a while).
In any case, the error persists with that laptop. My solution is to keep the latest loaner laptop and let my employer lose my laptop in the pile of problem laptops. If you're seeing the same semaphore error with your card, then I don't have much advice, but I'd like to hear from you.
Kasper Daniel Hansen has told me about his semaphore problems, which he thinks may be related to acpi's suspend-to-disk functionality. I have never played with that functionality, so his problem is distinct from mine, but you can read about it.
This did not work out of the box. The card uses the e1000
driver, which is part of Slackware's standard distribution, but
that module didn't work for me. I had to go to
Intel for a driver.
This driver works perfectly. Unfortunately, even from the
e1000 page, it's not really obvious where the
driver can be downloaded. I used this link.
The stock driver in the Linux 2.6.6 kernel works fine. If you use such a recent kernel, you shouldn't have to download another driver.
For this, I recommend Intel's open source Centrino driver (still experimental, I think). You could also try the Linuxant wrapper. Koen has tried it out and assures that it works. As I understand it, it has a 30-day trial period and is thereafter available for $19.95. See the Linuxant store for details.
As well, there is another free solution available, too. The
ndiswrapper
project works with our onboard wireless card, although I had
occasional problems with this one.
In any case, now that Intel's released a driver, I don't see much reason to use a third party solution.
Sorry, I haven't tried the modem. No idea if it works easily or not.
The keyboard has a combination backslash-pipe key in the lower left hand corner. When I installed Slackware, this key was mis-configured as a greater-than/less-than key. Fixing this requires two different steps, one for the console and the other for X.
/etc/rc.d/rc.keymap.
loadkeys << EOF
keycode 86 = backslash
shift keycode 86 = bar
EOF
Make sure the file is executable. For other distributions, you
want to put those commands in whatever scripts are executed at
startup.
.Xmodmap in your home directory and put the
following in it.
keycode 94 = backslash bar
.Xmodmap, since I got
tired of always hitting the CapsLock key.
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Control = Control_L
I don't know offhand how to fix X globally. I'm the only user on my laptop (aside from root), so I didn't look deeply into that problem.
/var/log/syslogreports:
Jul 1 14:08:23 euclid kernel: cdrom: dropping to single frame dma
rmmod
ide_cd and then modprobe it.
I'm running a 2.6.7 kernel these days to try and fix this problem, but it didn't do it. I've seen others report this error message, too, but nothing concrete about fixes. Let me know if you've seen and fixed this error.
If there are any other issues regarding this laptop, drop me a line. The above is about all I did to prepare my NEC Versa P520 for Linux.
Jesse F. Hughes
Last modified: Sat Jul 3 22:25:43 CEST 2004