Installing Linux Mint on a CF-28 (Dual Boot)

This guide is only semi-complete. I've yet to transfer the pictures from my camera to my new box... This also assumes you can install Windows XP by yourself without a guide.


You've got 3 options.

Install Linux Mint by itself, and have no Windows OS. If so, skip past all the windows bits up top, and go to where it it says Linux Mint in big bold letters.

Installing Mint over top of an existing Windows install that you don't want to erase. Backup your data, and skip down to Linux Mint, and read the steps for a Guided partition that resizes.

Installing a fresh Windows OS as well as Mint. Read everything if you want it to be easier.

Installing Windows XP​

If you can install XP, you can install Mint. They are both easy, though Mint is nicer if you're dyslexic, because it won't bark that you entered the wrong COA 40 times.

Insert your XP CD in the drive (Using an internal Panasonic drive preferably, or you might be kicking yourself), and boot up off of the CD.

When it comes time to chose a partition to install on, you'll want to delete the existing partition, and create three (3) new ones. They will be sized as follows;

1. Swap disk. Create to match the amount of physical RAM (Ie; 512, 768)
2. Windows install partition. Give it as much space as you think you'll need. Allow at least 5-7GB
3. Mint partition. Give it at least 5GB, though 10GB would be prefered.

On my 800, I set this up as;
768MB Swap, 60GB Windows, 19GB Linux.

If you need help with that part, I'll get more detailed bits later to ease that.

After you partition it, install Windows onto your Windows partition, feed it the COA, get annoyed that you mis-typed one number, feed it the COA again... maybe one more time if you screwed up a second character... Then have a working Windows OS.

Once windows is installed and operating, we can begin the fun.

Installing Linux Mint​

Insert your Mint 4.0 CD. Don't have one? Download one here then. Use Torrent if possible though! (Faster, and easier on the mirrors). For this instruction set, I'm using the Gnome Main edition.

Boot up off the CD the same way you'd boot up using a Windows CD. It'll as you to Start Linux Mint. If you don't do anything for 30 seconds, it'll do it by itself. Keep in mind, this is a LiveCD, and will take a bit for it to finish booting. Make a sandwich or something in the meantime.

When the CD boots up, you'll see "install" on the desktop. Double click that.

Select a language to proceed in (English is default, and probably what you want if you're reading this).
Hit forward.

Select your nearest local city for the time zone, and hit forward.

Select your keyboard (Probably the default), and hit forward.

You'll enter into the partitioner. This is where you get to choose a few options;

1. You'll either do a fresh clean install of Windows, as well as Linux

2. You'll be using an existing Windows install, and resizing the partition to fit linux on

3. You'll install linux only.


For #3, just hit "Guided - Use entire disk" and proceed.

For #1, if you've already installed windows and properly partitioned the drive, choose manual.

Edit your swap partition (Should be same size as the amount of physical RAM you have)
In Edit, change "Use as:" to "swap".

Edit your install partition (The one windows is not installed on)
In Edit, change "Use as:" to "ext3", and make the "Mount Point:" just a simple "/", without quotes.

Hit forward.

For #2, use "Guided - resize X, Partition #X, and use freed space"
Use the scroll to make the Linux partition as big as you need... keep in mind how much stuff is already in your windows partition, and make sure your data is backed up.
This may do damage!
Hit forward when you're done.


WARNING, DATA MAY/WILL BE ERASED WITH ANY OF THE LAST STEPS! Make sure nothing is on any partitions that are getting erased!

If you want your user info transfered from Windows, select the user, and enter your linux username. I'm unsure what stuff is brought over, but I'd imagine bookmarks, email settings, and various similar stuff would be included.

Now you enter your info. Make a username (If you didn't import from Windows), give it a password, etc, and hit Forward. If you can install Windows, you can do this. Hit forward when done.

You've now reached the last step before install... It'll tell you what's getting formatted. Click install if it looks alright to you.



Go out and grab yourself a bite to eat, or watch a couple episode of Family Guy. This part may take a while.



What are you still doing? I said to occupy yourself... this will take a while.

Still reading? Send a 6-pack of good beer to Modly.

Now I've eaten a good meal, and it should be installed, and you can click "restart now". When you hear your CD eject, hit enter and it'll finish restarting.

Shortly after, you'll see Grub load up, and you can select to boot up into Linux. (And if you didn't erase your partition like I did to help write this guide, you'll have Windows available too). When you do, you log in with the username and password you generated earlier, and it will ask if you want to enable root. I prefer to do so myself, but you may choose not to. It'll also ask you if you want to enable fortunes, and that's optional as well.

You should now be using Mint, and now you can configure things using following posts.

This will also be edited with photos eventually (preferably soon?), but it's there now.

Edit; Forgot a step; Importing info from XP

 

Excellent Guide Modly! I really need to find the time to take this step. I've been swamped for the past few days and will be today as well.

I should be able to post a little more in the next few days....

Again... Great job!

 

Thanks. I've got a little time to do more work on the guide this week (Hoping my hangover isn't bad tomorrow ), so some pictures should get up soon.

 

Modly, I have Ubuntu installed 7.1 and love it - I am trying to fix a WIFI issue and was wondering if you know a solution. I have an Atheros Chipset and it connects just fine but only shows me with a partial signal. I have the external wifi antenna (from toughbooks list of mods) and pull a 98% signal when using WIN2000 and the Gigabite utility. I am struggling to understand MADWIFI which is what everything I have read points to for the fix. Any thoughts?

- Also thanks for the info on the touchscreen - slight mods to the parameters and evetouch drive and whammo - perfect touch screen action. Love Linux. Thanks man - Rock on

 

Post your parameters up, that way people can try a few different ones to get one that is closest. I never calibrated the one I used while writing up the guide, but it was off a bit as well.

The wireless card... how much signal are you getting? It should be using Madwifi as the driver already, but it's possible that a newer version is needed.

So, how low of a signal (to compare it to windows)?
How far away are you from the router?

It may just be a setting that isn't enabled, but my Mint also shows slightly less signal that Windows does... (10-15%) so maybe it's not lying about signal strenth, or maybe it's not enabling my chipset to it's potential.

 

I haven't worked with MADWIFI chipset, but a very useful and simple tool to measure signal strength is Wavemon. It's in the Ubuntu repos (which is what Mint is based on):

Code:

sudo apt-get install wavemon

should install it easily, assuming you can get the TB online otherwise. Then just run sudo wavemon from a terminal. It will show link quality, signal and noise level, S/N ratio, and more stats. F7 is the config screen. I've used it on Prism2, Hermes, and Intel chipsets, and for those anyway, it 'just works'.

 

Thanks guys - My Ubuntu crashed - gets hung up after login and wont finish booting up ? only thing I did was hit the MUTE (FN key) crash city - I guess it does have a slightly different keyboard than most brands - Is this something or am I just crazy - need to reload it and will post up the setting and parameters.
Modly - as far as signal strenght, I get 98% showing in windows and 30-45% in Linux - It also shows 100% signals for routers that are outside - no way they are 100% so I am not sure if it really is low or just not being displayed properly - Thanks again - takes forever to load so will takle it as soon as I re load - plenty of Crown & Coke it will be alright

 

Yes, alcohol is needed to make stuff work. No doubt

I broke my Mint last night a little (Got some sweet translucent windows, but lost touchscreen and my mouse is SLOOOOOW), so I'm gonna use this chance to try out the KDE version (Should allow for the translucent windows I want, but it's still a beta).

I'll let you all know how it works out.

 

This is a cross-post, but it's relevant so I figured it was safe to throw it in here. This is in big part able to be done thanks to Stan.Distortion, and a few other helpful people at linuxquestions.org.

Getting the touchscreen working under Linux​

This is proven to work under Linux Mint 4.0, but should work with any Linux distro with kernel 2.6.22 or later. If it works in other distros, feel free to post a reply, and please post your parameters too (Min/Max X/Y).

This has been edited a bit since the last post because I realised that I had installed some other things... and they made it work. My configuration was long gone without it.

Before you do this first step, check your kernel version. The way it reads is if you've got 2.6.23 or later, you won't need this first part (maybe), so you might be able to save a few minutes and run this in a terminal;

Code:

uname -r

If it responds back with 2.6.23 or numerically higher, try without this first step first. It won't hurt anything to install evtouch last if it doesn't operate.

Fire up a terminal;

Code:

wget http://www.conan.de/touchscreen/evtouch-0.8.7.tar.gz

tar xzf evtouch-0.8.7.tar.gz

cd evtouch-0.8.7.tar.gz

sudo cp evtouch_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/

The last command works in Ubuntu/Mint. If you use another distro, check this first, but it may be "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input"


This will make a backup incase we screw things up;

Code:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bac

It'll ask for your password. Enter it.
That'll make sure if we screw anything up that you can quickly fix it.

Now we gotta edit xorg.conf

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

You gotta look for something that indicates a touchpad (Different distros may change what it says, or where).

In Mint, It's listed with the Identifier as "Synaptics Touchpad".

If you see that, change everything from Section "InputDevice" to "EndSection" to this;

Code:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Synaptics Touchpad"
	Driver		"evtouch"
	Option		"SendCoreEvents"	"true"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/input/event3"
	Option		"Emulate3Buttons"
	Option		"Emulate3Timeout"	"50"
	Option		"Name"			"CF-28 Touchscreen"
	Option		"Mode"			"absolute"
	Option		"MinX"			"160"
	Option		"MinY"			"360"
	Option		"MaxX"			"3870"
	Option		"MaxY"			"3880"
EndSection

That should get you close on a 13.3" touchscreen. If you've got a 12", you'll need other Min/Max X/Y parameters. I'll get those in a few minutes.

Save the file by hitting control-S or the save button up top. Make sure there are no extra characters outside of the quotation marks, or it will screw things up.

After it's saved, hit "Control-Alt-Backspace", and it'll kill your X environment. It should ask you to log back in. Do that, and test out the touchscreen.

For a 12" screen, use these parameters instead (These are courtesy of stan.distortion).

Code:

Option "MinX" "400"
Option "MaxX" "3850"
Option "MinY" "380"
Option "MaxY" "3780"

If it's spot on, then good for you and me.

The way to properly test calibration for the touchscreen is to touch it in the center, and see if the pointer is where you poked. Use a pointed object (Like a pen that can retract the inkball). If it's right under the pen, that's a good start. Start poking an inch apart to the left, and see if the pointer is still right under the pen, until you reach the edge. Keep a rough mental note of how far away it gets (It'll either start going too far to the left or right, or be right on). Now try the same thing but going to the right hand side of the screen.

Make notes of how far away it is.

Go back to the center, and go up towards the top of the screen in inch increments. Do the same for the bottom.

If you are dead on in all directions, disregard the rest of this post, and start using it.

If not, This is how you start getting it closer.

When you go to the left side of the screen, and the pointer is left of where you touch, you need to decrease the "MinX" number. If you're off by more than a quarter inch, drop the value by 50 (So if you're at 160, go to 110), but if less than that, go by 10 or 20. If the pointer is to the right of where you touch, increase the number.

Same thing goes for the opposite side of the screen, but you gotta change the "MaxX" value.

Save and restart X (Control-Alt-backspace), and repeat until it's centered on the X-axis.

For vertical, If it's pointing too high at the top of the screen, decrease "MinY", or if it's below the point, increase it. Then at the bottom, if you're pointing too low, Increase the "MaxY" value, etc.

 

Kubuntu is good, but it's that KDE vs Gnome thing. Compiz (formerly Beryl) is fun stuff, but it takes some horsepower to run a top/bottom cube image, rotating gears inside transparent sides, with snow enabled.

I'm having a problem with a custom Mint remaster? It works perfectly in Vmware, and on 2 out of 3 actual machines it installs fine. On one of three, when I run the 'install' icon, it fails at 94% on installing Grub. When I view with

Code:

tail -f /var/log/messages

I see errors about /dev/hdX does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.

I have manually installed Grub on (hd0,0) using

Code:

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

and get the same message. I am wondering if it is some specific combination of hardware that is making it mess up. Otherwise, it's four months of work down the drain.

[Linux] uptime
11:52pm up 139 days, 12:31, 2 users, load average: 0.10, 0.02, 0.01

 

I wonder if you can edit the menu.lst somehow from the liveCD and do it manually?

 

I could, if there was a /boot/grub/menu.lst present. I am booting from a custom remaster, and if the install fails, it's not there. The filesystem is otherwise present, but no Grub.

 

Might be hardware then... Sounds a bit weird.

Completely unrelated, but have you ever gotten Compiz to work on your toughbook? I just want opacity to work... but I don't think my video card can handle it

 

I haven't tried Compiz on a CF-28, mine doesn't have either the vid or the horsepower. I have a Stinkpad w/2 gig of ram that it works fine on. I can play movies in each side of the cube, and htop only shows 22% CPU usage while rotating it. Both run Sidux, each have their intended uses. The Toughbook is a dedicated wardriver/security box, the Stinkpad is a development/work/reliable thing.

My motto: keep using them all!

 

I've been tampering with it because I really like some translucent effects (Makes it look more high tech), but I'm not too worried about the cube or wobble or anything... strictly for making things see-through.

But I keep whacking into problems. I can get compiz to run and work, but if I restart, it's screwed up and I gotta launch metacity. However, the same thing happened when I tried using xfce's WM... worked great, gave it a restart, and it was screwey.

My toughbook will be used primary for the same purpose, but I wanna make it look cool while it's doing it.

 

Hey Modly - can you think of any reason I would lose visual of my mouse pointer ? It is actually their just cant see it - if I move my mouse around I can see it highlight as I scroll over things and I can click on them and it works as it should - just can't see the actual pointer? This is a fresh install of 7.10 Ubuntu and all I have done is load thunderbird and got enigmail loaded on. I have not even had a chance to bring my encryption keys over yet - was left overnight and when I woke it up - no mouse pionter - thanks

 

I'm not sure, that might be a question for the linux section guys. I know I keep screwing up my install when I tamper with translucency and my mouse ends up incredibly slow (and unable to click!). As easy as it is to give up on making my OS look like glass, I just can't learn my lesson

But I'd try asking those guys in linux compatability and software about your problem, they would have a much better idea than I would.

 

Modly,
I found a patch for the missing mouse pointer - apparently it is in the graphics card - all I had to do was add 2 lines to the xorg.conf under device section.
Option "HWcursor" "False"
Option "SWcursor" "True"
Fixed it right up - looks like it is a known problem with nVidia but others as well.

Later

 

Sweet, good info to have. That wasn't on your toughbook was it?

 

yep- on my 28. Guess I'm special

 

I've seen this problem on Centos as well (very annoying!), but easy to fix. Google is our friend.

EDIT:
A different, fairly rare problem I had with Mint, was a stream of garbage, in a box-shape upon initial boot:

Code:

Pstk | | rstk
0: 6052d.a | |
1:60513.a | |
2:2c22d.4 | |
3: 147.9 | 0 | ffffffff .5
4: a1 | | 1462.5

err8
ip23a5 1a7 

The solution is to comment out gfxmenu in /boot/grub/menu.lst, gfxboot seems to have issues (overflow) in combination with some BIOS. Since the variety of BIOS available here (toughbook forums) will be limited, less chance of it happening here. I think the hardware I had to do that on was Intel 1.7 ghz, don't recall the motherboard/BIOS.

 

Modley,
An excellent guide to setting up the touchscreen. I used it in Ubuntu 7.10 to set up my CF-28 with only minimal adjustments to the X and Y values.

 

What about hotkeys? Do they work? (if not is there a way to make them work? )

So touchscreen and touchpad works fine (I've read a lot about broblems with touchpad after seting touchscreen)


Did You try it with CF-29? (I'd like to change my 28 to 29 )

 

I've had trouble with the touchscreen since the kernel that I thought would fix the problems was released. I haven't updated it to the latest kernel yet though...

I honestly can't remember if the hotkeys worked or not. I work so many hours now, that I don't have time to play with my toughbook anymore.

 

I've instaled Linux Mint with XCFG, the last one (5.0, based on the new Ubuntu). But I've got some problems with that touchscreen.... when I change the xorg.conf the way You wrote, the X-server doesn't start. Only black screen.

The hotkeys does work, but that green icon when seting something doesnt appear. Only in terminal (without X-server) "something" appears .

 

I have not had much luck with HotKeys - some work other cause issues - have not devoted any time to chase them down though I would like the screen brightness keys to work. You can set the volume through the shortcut key utility in preferences but not screen brightness. Only key that has never given me problems is the keyboard back light adjust -

 

Now I have DSL linux on my CF-28. And all hotheys does work (as in windows -green icon in the middle, all adjustments work). I didn't try to install touchscreen because I've got some more important problems with it.... It's not as easy to set/ install as Ubuntu, Mint etc.