HOWTO: Installing Debian Linux on the Samsung VM8076cT Laptop

Introduction

The Samsung VM8076cT laptop has the following specification:

Celeron 766
128MB RAM (although 16MB of this is stolen by the graphics card)
10GB hard-disk

which are all well and good for a hype campaign; indeed, Comet in the UK heavily advertised this model (to the extent of a TV ad campaign.)

However, these are less interesting to the Linux user than the following;

SiS900 integrated networking;
SiS7018 integrated soundchip/winmodem;
SiS630 integrated graphics.

Also, 2 hours of battery life; this has turned out to be a fairly realistic claim. and the laptop does have a Li-ion battery, and a 12.1" TFT which will display 1024x768.

Support for all of the above hardware was claimed by the Linux kernel and/or XFree86; hence I chose to purchase this laptop.

Initial Install

This was fairly trouble-free. I chose to use GNU Parted to resize the existing windows partition; it complained about a one-cylinder misalignment in the partition table, which it claimed to fix. Certainly, the Windows ME install still worked fine afterwards - however, I had taken backups beforehand, and I would strongly advise that anyone else installing does the same.

I then proceeded to install the base Debian 2.2 system from CD; this was trouble-free, and the system booted fine off these.

Sound and Networking

These were extremely easy to get working. An important caveat is that the support for the SiS900 chipset in 2.2 is characterised as 'experimental': this approximately translates to 'extremely slow'. However, support is fine in 2.4 using the sis900 module.

Sound was equally easy; the SiS7018 chipset is a rebadged and slightly modified Trident 4DWave, and is hence supported by the trident kernel module. This inserts a module by the name of ac97_modem, but I have not investigated if this can successfully drive the onboard winmodem (which appears to be of the HAMR type).

XFree86

This proved to be somewhat trickier to get working; although both XFree 3.3.6 and 4.1.0 proclaim to support this graphics chipset (in the latter case 'experimentally and with known bugs'), neither actually worked; nor did the SiS630 framebuffer support in the kernel (which just caused kernel oopses).

However, the SiS630 is a fully VESA-compliant chipset; hence the following steps lead to a working X setup:

Install XFree86 4.1.0 (at present, this means upgrading to Debian 2.3 testing; I have no idea of the status of X packages for other distributions.)
Compile your kernel with support for VESA framebuffer devices, and set your console to be 1024x768 in 16-bit colour.
The relevant excerpt from lilo.conf is:
```
 
	  image=/vmlinuz-2.4.9
               label=Linux-2.4.9
               vga=0x317 
        
```
Set XFree86 to use the XF86_FBDev server, and to be in 1024x768x16-bit.

The onboard glidepad is a two-button Microsoft-protocol mouse: therefore, use Protocol "Microsoft" and Emulate3Buttons; everything else appears to work. However, I would recommend that (given the somewhat awkward position of CTRL on the keyboard) that CTRL and CAPS LOCK are swapped in your xmodmap.

My XF86Config is here; it is heavily based on the one for the Gericom Webboy to be found on the Familie Schuetze website, with some relatively minor modifications and some tidying up.

Andrew Walkingshaw

Last modified: Sun Sep 23 04:41:09 BST 2001