Freespire 1.0.13 Linux on IBM T22 Laptop

Article for Linux-on-Laptops website
Date Nov 2006

STOP PRESS Feb 2007 - Canonical, and Linspire anounce collaboration Linspire to use Ubuntu as its base, and Ubuntu to use CNR!

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
Pentium III "coppermine" Processor, 900 MHz. BIOS upgraded to latest from IBM site in 2005.	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
14.1 TFT Display	Works	defaults to 1024 x 768 No special procedure required during installation
Trackpoint	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Keyboard (UK)	Works	Need to change UK k/b config to "basic" from "intl" layout variant.
On-board Video and Sound	Works	No special procedure required during installation
512MB (system maximum), SDRAM, 2DIMMs	Works	No special procedure required during installation
60 GB Fujitsu 5400rpm Hard Drive (replacement)	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Modular Floppy Drive	Not tested	floppy drive lostn
Integrated 10/100 Network Card with 56k modem	RJ45 ethernet Works, modem not tested.	No special procedure required during installation
IBM HITACHI GD-S200 DVD-ROM Drive	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Lithium-Ion Battery	Works, needs replacing!	No special procedure required during installation
Onboard Sound Card	Works	No special procedure required during installation
HP3845 printer	Works	install with desktop printer icon on desktop (CUPS). HPLIP also loaded using CNR but did not integrate with the CUPS; HPLIP uninstalled in the end. Occasionally printer "stops" itself with jobs queued and refuses to stay restarted for more than 5 seconds, - IPP report says failed to open USB device - needs restart . Still investigating.
BT Voyager 220V Router/Modem via RJ45 and Firefox	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Belkin F5U222 USB 2.0 Notebook card	Works	No special procedure required during installation Supports two USB2.0 devices.
USB memory stick 256Mb	Works	in Belkin card
Nikon Coolpix 2100 Camera	Works	In Belkin Card. Seen as a disk drive.
Logitech Marble Mouse	Works. This T22 has poor USB1 power output. Mouse is about its limit, on Linux and Windoze alike.	In USB 1.1 socket. No special procedure required during installation
LG GSA 2164D external DVR+_RW	Works	Works in K3b, and growisofs command
Canon 9950F scanner	Does NOT Work	No driver in Linux kernel

This distribution runs Kernel 2.6.14

This laptop was originally supplied with Windoze 2000.

Conclusion

Highly Recommended, especially for the first foray into Linux from Windoze, or for that old Pentium3 for the kids to use. This distro is stable and way back from the bleeding edge. From a look-and-feel perspective, it is no coincidence that this product once upon a time was known as "Lindows". UK users must check and fix the keyboard settings in this version as mentioned below.
Freespire has all the drivers I needed for T22 and my peripherals (apart from Canon 9500F scanner but that is Canon's problem)
Compared to Ubuntu 6.06 it is much slower to boot, but CNR is very suited to newbies, and also enables re-installation of applications if the OS needs to be reinstalled. Firefox comes ready plugged into Realplay, and DVDs play smoothly in Freespire Xine whereas Ubuntu is jerky whatever I try.
OpenOffice 2.0 comes preinstalled. The average web-surfer/Office-user will have absolutely everything they could want ready installed, with more just a click away.
Mobile computing, suspend etc, probably needs more work as in most distros. Recommend fixing the sudo security hole (below).

Installation of Freespire 1.0.13

Freespire is a community created version of the commercial Linspire product.
Source: Single CD from from The Linux Man (UK (£1.99) )
F12 to select boot device (DVD ROM) and boot on CD.
The standard options include Install on Hard Disk, and Run Live version from CD. Having tried the live version I decided to install, which required a reboot from CD. I already had Windoze and Ubuntu on two partitions. With the Swap partition that only left one partition (max of 4) so I created an extended partition (hda4) of 10Gb using "GParted", and created a 5Gb logical partition (hda5) for Freespire. That left another 5Gb for a third Distro if I wished.
I selected the Install on Hard Disk option from the boot menu, then used the Advanced option rather than the "Entire Hard Disk" option which would have wiped the whole PC.
The Advanced option invited me to use one of the several partitions, and I selected the hda5 I had just created with GParted.
OOPS! I forgot to UNCheck the "Write MBR" option. This meant that the installation wrote a new GRUB boot loader on the hda5 partition. Although it included the Windoze 2000, it failed to notice my Ubuntu, so I LOST my boot for Ubuntu. Not very friendly guys! See end of article to see how I fixed it.
Apart from selecting keyboard version and world location there was little user intervention needed for the 15 minute install process. There were Windoze-like feature adverts shown every minute or so, including a claim for wireless support which I could not test as I am strictly wired only. The install was happy to use my existing Swap partition, as was expected.

First Impressions

This distro runs KDE with which I am not familiar. However the icons are crisp and bright on a nice blue background - very like my Windoze 2000 desktop! Obviously the graphics designers are very talented. I'm not sure about the bouncing ball instead of an egg timer, but it's fun I guess. The taskbar below the screen is intuitive and it didn't take me long to find the control center, file manager etc. I tried to drag the taskbar to the side of the screen which I prefer but it turns out that you need to right click on the bar and use Configure Panel File in ther Panel Menu. File Manager had full read/write access to my Ubuntu partition and full read access to my Windoze partition by default. [With Ubuntu I had to create an fstab entry manually.] Looks good for newbies, possibly restricts advanced users? File manager has "My Computer", "My Documents" etc already set up in the file system in Windoze fashion - either you love it or loath it. Strangely "My Documents" is part of "My Computer", but it shows up alongside it in the /home/user in file manager. Illogigal Captain. Also having spaces in directory names in Linux is wierd as you need to use quotes in terminal commands. At least in version 2.0 they intend dropping the "My" part, (and promise to fix the UK keyboard bug below).
Surprisingly after install there were just two updates and no more appeared after a week. I suspect Linspire is a very stable very safe and therefore a little back from the leading edge using apps that are one generation at least behind the latest in the name of stability.

Detected Hardware - details

Keyboard - this had a strange quirk - the double and single quotes needed two keystrokes to make them write. A single apostrophy s resulted in an s with a french accent over it! To fix it this required me to go into the regional keyboard layout part of the Control center. I had to change the layout variant of the UK keyboard from "intl" to "basic". I assume "intl" is for french accents.
IBM HITACHI GD-S200 DVD-ROM - Works well. Screen icon even if no disk loaded.

To play DVD movies Xine needs to be installed from CNR but it then will play give-away movies smoothly. I thought my PC was not powerful enough because Ubuntu plays them jerkily, but Freespire is a beaut. No need to install codecs and special libraries for these free-in-the Sunday-Times DVDs, but to play commercial encrypted movies like D*sney you will need to install a couple of libraries W32codecs and libdvdcss. Due to legal problems, Debian cannot distribute libdvdcss, but it is available on other places on the internet.
If it is legal for you to use css, you can install the libdvdread3 package from CNR, then in a Terminal type
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh
to download and install it. - see Freespire FAQs and user forum for more help.
You can also purchase PowerDVD from CNR if you prefer to spend money.

Canon 9500F scanner - Not supported by Linux at all. Does NOT work.


Sound - Works well, including Live Radio. This heavily modified Freespire version of Firefox seems to have RealPlayer pre-installed which plays all the BBC audio stuff I tested. [With Ubuntu I had to download and configure a plug-in which did not always play everything I tested].
Some recent websites need Adobe Flash Player v9 which I have found usually do not "play" fully on Flash-for-Linux V7.
According to the wiki (at Nov 2006) the following are pre-installed in the full version of Freespire (not in the purist OSS version)
* 1 Microsoft Windoze Media Technology
* 2 Quicktime 7 Software
* 3 mp3 Software Decoder
* 4 RealPlayer Software
* 5 Sun Java 2 Platform Standard Edition Runtime Environment 5.0
* 6 Macromedia Flash Plug-In
* 7 Bitstream Fonts
* 8 Gizmo Project
* 9 Agere Systems Modem Drivers
* 10 ATI Technologies Linux Driver
* 11 Conexant/Linuxant HCF PCI Modem Driver
* 12 Conexant HSF Modem Driver
* 13 Intel Modem Drivers
* 14 QEMU Accelerator Module (aka kqemu)
* 15 Lucent linmodem driver
* 16 MADWIFI Wireless Drivers
* 17 NVIDIA Accelerated Video Drivers
* 18 PCTEL Modem Driver
* 19 Ralink Wireless Driver
* 20 SmartLink Modem Driver

Unfortunately with this web-browser version (actually so heavily modified they cannot call it Firefox anymore), the file download manager seems to download to /tmp , probably because the default download destination is /root/desktop, to which normal user does not have access. Change to your selected location and restart Web-Browser.

Power Management - Has basic power save functions such as suspend after time period. I decided to disable them all as ACPI is still not stable in Linux. (IMHO)

IBM blue function keys Fn/F3 Fn/F4 Fn/F12 do not work. Fn/F7 (toggle screen output) works. I did notice that when I Fn/F7'd the screen at night to avoid shutting down, the screen would not come back in the morning. How it becomes time-dependant is a puzzle to me. I now have the screensave/powersave combination working to give me the dark screen for long idle times.

Trackpoint mouse button works. Tap-the-pointer is not enabled, not that I use it anyway. USB mouse is fine too.

Mounting devices

The devices "mount" on very long named devices. For example the USB HDD mounts on /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 instead of something like /dev/sdc0. Maybe it's my ignorance but that seems a bit inconvenient.

You may also find that you have insufficient access to delete/change files on a USB device if the device was already plugged-in at boot-up. This is because it assumes that Root has mounted the device and only Root has delete access. Simply unmount the device (right click on the desktop icon to unmount), unplug the device, count up to 10, then plug the device back in. After another 10 seconds you should have full access because now you mounted it.

Boot-up Times and other response times

Cold Boot, including log-on of user, 3 minutes 25 seconds (slow!). HDD falls silent almost immediately at this point - hardly a flicker on the LED.
Opening Firefox browser into home page, another 20 seconds. Both these benchmarks are about double the times for Ubuntu. Freespire 2.0 (?Jan 2007) is promised to have a quicker boot-up.
Open OpenOffice.org into Spreadsheet with 16 worksheets, 40 seconds ( Starting with OpenOfice closed, and double-click on spreadsheet in file browser,) [c.f. Ubuntu 31 seconds]
Shut down time 35 seconds. This laptop often freezes with the splash screen time-bar on about 95%, but that happens with Windoze, and all the Linuxes I have tried on it. It's a T22 thing - just hold down the button for 4 seconds to complete switch-off.

Compare this to Windoze 2000 on same laptop; takes 3 minutes 36 seconds to get past virus checker startup, and into desktop, and HDD is still reading constantly for some many minutes after. I did try Win XP but although it worked, the old gal never stopped reading the HDD - ever!

Install extra software

The good news is that CNR (Click n Run), which used to be $20 a year has been free of charge since September 2006. You just need to register (free) your email address. Once signed-into CNR, I used the search button for Quanta Plus (my HTML editor) It found version 3.3 (Ubuntu had v 3.5). I selected the immediate load button and it loaded silently with a tab indicator at the bottom of the screen. The CNR system is intuitive to use, and it claims to have over 20,000 items of software. It is very painless for a linux newbie to use. There is no enabling of repositories to do, though apt-get is still available if you know how. The "My Products" tab remembers what you have installed in the past, and as I usually reinstall Linux after I have played about and messed-up a few times, this makes reinstallation of extra apps a doddle, as they are all in a list. As this distro has commercial background I believe there is a Click n Buy option for commercial software which I didn't test as it's against my religion to pay for software, and there is a £49 a year help-desk supported "CNR Gold".
I didn't find a way of refreshing in-the-box apps like K3b for a newer version - I guess it's down to apt-get if you know how to, but you then need to wrestle with dependencies.

Root and Sudo

There is no Root user out of the box, like Ubuntu, but unlike Ubuntu you can activate it in Kuser as follows:
Launch/Settings/Additional Options/KUser
Double click on Root user
In Groups check the Desktop checkbox
In UserInfo tab set a password using the button.
In UserInfo, Disable the Account Disabled checkbox.
Hit OK
I did find Root useful to get out of a few jams manipulating my data files from my previous distro.

The default user is an "admin" user - i.e. you can many things, and those you can't can be done with sudo in terminal. However sudo does NOT request a password. This could be seen as an invitation for malware to attack Freespire and can be fixed easily.
Open up a Terminal
Type sudo visudo
Type i to enter insert mode in vi
Use cursor keys to move to the line beginning %admins
change it to say...
%admins ALL=(ALL) ALL
hit esc then :wq and hit enter (means exit insert mode, write and quit)
Now reboot, and you will be forced for a password when using sudo.

Fixing the zapped Ubuntu Master Boot Record!

You may remember that I forgot to un-check the Write MBR in the installer advanced menu. This disabled my boot record for Ubuntu on hd0 and put a new one on hd4 making it impossible to boot Ubuntu. I first tried adding an entry on Freespire's /boot/grub/menu-normal.lst copied from the old menu.lst in my Ubuntu partition. It failed with file not found.
I then Googled the problem and came up with thie GRUB reinstatement fix.
First boot up with Ubuntu CD as a Live session.
In Ubuntu Terminal
sudo grub
> find /boot/grub/stage1
this gave me two locations, (hd0,1) and (hd0,4). The 0,1 was the one I wanted reinstated. so next command is
> root (hd0,1)
> setup (hd0)
> quit

To get into Freespire I copied two entries from the Freespire /boot/grub/menu-normal.lst into the Ubuntu /boot/grub/menu.lst. That worked.