KDS Valiant 6481CiPTD

Overview

The KDS Valiant 6481CiPTD, although very inexpensive, is a great laptop to run Linux on. Although there are some serious quirks to work around with the video card, my installation of Red Hat 7.1 went relatively smoothly.

Hardware

This laptop came with a Pentium III 800 mhz processor, 128 mb of RAM, a 20 gb hard drive, a 14.1" TFT display, a DVD player, onboard ethernet, and onboard modem. The video card is a Trident Cyber Blade Ai1 AGP with 8 mb of RAM, and it is capable of running at 1024x768@32 in Windows and 1024x768@16 in Linux.

Current Problems

Here are some currently unresolved issues:

• I have spent practically no time playing with the modem, but I do believe it's a Win modem. In any case, PCMCIA modems are cheap.
• Occasionally, the screen appears to be out of horizontal sync. This is easily fixed by quickly switching to a virtual terminal and then back (i.e. hit control-alt-F1 and then control-alt-F7).

All in all, I have a very workable setup, and for an old Linux laptop user such as myself, I was very pleased to see things go so well!

Installation

During my installation of Red Hat 7.1, I compiled the following points to keep in mind:

• If you use an external mouse, it must be plugged in before you boot your computer. You may use either an external mouse or the internal mouse, but you must make your decision before you boot, and you will not be able to switch until you reboot.
• Due to the 1024 cylinder limit on boot partitions, if you decide to use multiple operating systems, each operating system must have a boot partition that is below the 1024 cylinder limit (i.e. toward the front of the drive). Because Red Hat's Disk Druid likes to automatically decide where on the hard drive to place newly created partitions, you'll have to use fdisk if you really want to get fancy. If you're like me, a 20 gb hard drive will definitely inspire you to get fancy!

• The procedure for setting up your video card is a bit non-trivial. When you are setting up your video card settings, choose the driver for the Trident Cyber Blade Ai1 AGP; use 1024x768 for the resolution; and use 16 bpp for the color depth. At this point you may test the X setup, but do not choose to use the graphical login! For whatever reason, the X setup stops working as soon as you reboot, so you'll need access to the console without having gdm continually trying to restart itself. After your installation finishes, and you reboot you computer, you'll need to edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file. Based on reading the man page (which actually seemed to be partially incorrect) and a fair amount of experimentation, I discovered that you must replace:

  Section "Device"
          Identifier "My Video Card"
          Driver "trident"
          BoardName "Unknown"
  EndSection
  

  with:

  Section "Device"
          Identifier "My Video Card"
          Driver "trident"
          BoardName "Unknown"
          Option "CyberShadow" "on"
          Option "SWCursor" "on"
  EndSection
  

  If you'd like, here is a copy of my XF86Config-4 file.

  Turning on "CyberShadow" is of critical importance. Without it, only one horizontal inch of the screen will be displayed correctly. Naturally, this renders the screen unusable.

  Turning on "SWCursor" relieves some strange behavior. Without it, my laptop would often freeze during sleep mode. Even stranger, if it did survive the sleep mode, the video card seemed to draw the mouse cursor slightly to the right of where the mouse actually was (i.e. the widget that received the mouse click was slightly to the right of the widget that the mouse appeared to be over). I assume that this means that the hardware is out of sync with the software, hence using software for doing the cursor fixes things perfectly.

  Once you finish hacking the XF86Config-4 file, you should use "startx" to ensure that X works properly. If you are satisfied and wish to switch back to using a graphical login, edit /etc/inittab and set the default runlevel to 5 (i.e. replace "id:3:initdefault:" with "id:5:initdefault:"). Hopefully, after a reboot (or after you run "init 5" as root), you'll now have a beautifully functioning X server.

• Although learning how to use DVD's under Linux is way beyond the scope of this document, you can find out more at www.linuxvideo.org.
• Note that the sound card, the ethernet card, and the cdrom portion of the DVD player worked without any special configuration.

Email Received

Here is a collection of helpful email I have received from other KDS Valiant 6481CiPTD owners: