Winfried M. Thalmeier

Story about my Samsung Q10 (Q10TXC)

How I have installed Linux On my Q10

Recently I purchased a Samsung Q10 (Q10TXC) with W2K preinstalled. It was obvious, that I wanted to install Linux on it, leaving W2K as a dual-boot-option. Here is a short first description, that might be helpful to other people.

First I tried to install Debian 3.0r0 (woody) directly via the DVD/CD-RW-drive in the docking-station. That failed 'cause of two reasons:

So I tried an other "boot method": There is a CD-ROM bootable Debian based distribution called Knoppix. I booted Knoppix 3.1 on an other box and copied the ieee1394, ohci1394 and sbp2 to a floppy. Then I booted Knoppix in expert mode and loaded the additional IEEE1394 drivers from floppy. After this Knoppix booted without any problems and and XFree86, network, wlan and powermanagement worked well.

Unfortunately Knoppix was a pure CD-ROM demo and rescue system that time, that had no built-in mechanisms to install itself on a HDD. This time knx-hdinstall a bash-script of Christian Perle did the requested job. In later versions knx-hdinstall is part of Knoppix.

With Knoppix installed on my system like this, I can work with Linux on my notebook and easily upgrade my system using the Debian distribution.

There are some problems left with the CD-RW drive. It isn't found at startup. The dirty solution to get it work was to remove and reinsert the sbp2 module with:

modprobe -r sbp2 ohci1394 ieee1394
and
modprobe ieee1394
modprobe ohci1394
modprobe sbp2
Since kernel 2.4.23 also ohci1394 and ieee1394 have to be reloaded.
After this you can see a device /dev/sr0 or /dev/scd0 which can be used for reading an burning CDs. I had no problems with the floppy. It seems to be handled by BIOS.

Thanks to the developers of all the excellent tools that helped my get running the system.

The Samsung Q10TXC is an excellent toy for big boys :-)

Known Problems and later issues

Caution: Other guys had difficulties using the Knoppix installation methode as I did because the floppy in the docking station were not recognized. Maybe there are different BIOS-Versions. I did not find out, why it worked on my device. Having no need to reinstall my system I didn't test a lot of variantes.

Kernel-Versions

XFree86

The DRI conflicts with APM. Removing GLcore and dri from the section "Module" in XF86Config helps avoiding the APM-resume freeze

Knoppix

Since my first installation there have been many versions of the Knoppix distribution. Just having Knoppix 3.4 in my hands i have tested the new Kernel 2.6.1. I was happy to see that Knoppix now can boot directly from the ieee1394-device, without loading extra modules.

Other references

See also:

Not yet tested: ACPI, Modem

See also: