I. Introduction

The Texas Instruments Extensa 570 is a noteworthy notebook with a good price / performance ratio, well worth examining for anyone who starts (as I did) with the goal of an inexpensive laptop Unix system.

This page is an attempt at a "How To" install Linux on the Extensa 570.  It represents my accumulated knowledge and experience installing Linux on my own Extensa, along with information and files provided by others who have been down this road before me.

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in any of the companies mentioned in this page.  Nor do these instructions guarantee successful installation of Linux; they are simply my small contribution to the growing Linux community.  Caveat Implementor.

II. Hardware

The hardware configuration for my Extensa is listed below.  The particulars do not necessarily affect the installation, but if you're shopping for a notebook for Linux, this will give you an idea of the capabilities of this machine.  (And to give you a ballpark figure, in August '96 I paid $2500 for this machine, mail-order.)

100 MHz Pentium 24 MB RAM (I recommend a minimum of 16 MB for Linux) 810 MB HDD 6x Torisan CD-ROM (swappable with floppy drive) 3.5 inch floppy drive 11.4 inch (diagonal) dual-scan color display (Cirrus Logic CLGD7543 chipset, 1MB video RAM) "Glidepad" touchpad. 1 NiMH battery

1 serial port (male, 9 pin) built-in stereo speakers with output jacks, sound card built-in microphone with input jack 1 type III or 2 type II PCMCIA card slots 1 parallel port (female, 25 pin) 1 video output port 1 keyboard/mouse port IR transfer port

Note: the floppy drive and the CD-ROM are not hot-swappable, at least under Linux.

III. Saving Windows '95

My Extensa, like most Intel-based PCs these days, came pre-installed with Windows '95 on a single, all-encompassing disk partition...and no media.  Neither Texas Instruments nor the reseller (Computer Discount Warehouse) were able (allowed?) to provide media, despite my requests.  (Although TI was very helpful in other ways -- see below.)

Since I planned to wipe the hard disk and install Windows '95 and Linux on separate partitions, my first move was to backup Windows.

(While it is possible to repartition the disk without wiping Windows, I still strongly recommend that you backup Windows immediately, in any case.)

Windows has a "Make System Disks" tool that creates a full set of Windows installation disks.  (In fact, every 5th time that you boot the machine, Windows will suggest that you run this tool, to create a backup of your distribution.)

This tool creates a Windows '95 distribution on 33 (!) 3.5 inch floppy diskettes.  I strongly recommend that you format and verify all 33 disks yourself.  The Windows tool will format the disks, but its verification is not very good -- one of my disks had a media error which slipped by the tool.  When I went to reinstall Windows on a new partition, several files could not be read, and the install failed as a consequence.

(Fortunately, TI technical support -- 800 848 3927 (voice), 817 774 6809 (BBS) -- was able to ship me a replacement for the particular disk, free of charge.)

IV. Installing Linux

The most challenging aspect of Installing Linux on the Extensa is the "swappable" floppy disk and CD-ROM.  Since only one of these devices can be present in the machine at a time, traditional "floppy and CD-ROM" installation methods will not work.

There are at least four methods (that I know of) that have been used:

1. Boot MSDOS 6 and install from CDROM.  (This is what I did.)

2. Install from CDROM under Windows 95 "DOS mode".

3. Keep Windows '95 and make Linux disks.

4. Vinzenz Grabner (zen@gams.co.at) says he "...installed the redhat stuff from a NFS mounted CD Drive on the network using a the PCMCIA 3Com Card 3c589.  This works without problems."

V. Configuring Linux

The Linux installation procedure will ask you several configuration questions.  The precise details depend on which Linux distribution you are installing, but many of the questions are common to all distributions.

(I chose Red Hat 3.03 for my Extensa, so my information relates to their installation procedure.  If Yggdrasil supported a "floppyless" install, I probably would have chosen them instead.)

Most of the answers should be obvious, but a few are not:

• When asked to select a CD-ROM type, choose IDE/ATAPI.

• The device name for the CD-ROM should be /dev/hdb

• Choose text-based installation & configuration.  (Don't choose X!)

• It doesn't really matter which X server you choose, since you are (presumably) going to replace it later anyway.

• The "mouse" (touchpad) is a PS2 bus-mouse.

• When installing optional packages, do install a.out support (in addition to ELF).  It appears that some of the X packages need this.

• If you are installing both Linux and Windows '95, I recommend that you put LILO on the boot track(?) of the Linux partition, rather than on the MBR.  Then you can make the Linux partition the "active" partition (from either Linux fdisk or Windows fdisk) and have an easy choice of which system to boot.

VI. Installing and Configuring X Windows

Most distributions of Linux include XFree86, a "free" release of X version 11 release 6 ("X11R6").  As of release 3.1.2, XFree86 did not support the Cirrus Logic CLGD7543 chipset used in the Extensa.  (Supposedly the beta release, 3.1.2F, does support this chipset, but I was not able to get it to work.)

Eric Anderson (location currently unknown) produced a set of patches to XFree86 that makes it work with the Extensa, and provides a full 800 x 600 screen resolution.  You can install these patches on your system in one of several different ways:

1. Matteo Vaccari has added the patches to the X server for Linux kernel 1.2.13.  (It also appears to work with the 2.0 kernel.)  You can download his package (1.3 MB), and install it by uncompressing and untar'ing the files, and moving them into the directories shown below.  This worked beautifully for me.

   	XF86_SVGA	=>	/usr/X11R6/bin
   	startx	=>	/usr/X11R6/bin
   	XF86Config	=>	/etc/X11

2. Vinzenz Grabner has put together a similar package for systems running the 2.x Linux kernel.  You can download his package (1 MB) and install it by uncompressing and untar'ing the files, etc. as above.

   (I have not tried it; you may have to create your own startx file to define a special environment variable, either ASCENTIA950N-ACTIVE, or ASCENTIA950N_ACTIVE, in order to enable the patches.)

3. Georg Thomas (thomas@itd.nrl.navy.mil) has provided what appears to be the entire source code for the X server, including the patches.  If you have a lot of free disk space (say, 200 meg), you can download it (37 MB) and compile it yourself.

VII. Other Sources of Information

See the Linux Laptop Home Page for general information about Linux on laptops and notebooks.

Vinzenz Grabner maintains a page about Linux and the Extensa 570.

Georg Thomas (thomas@itd.nrl.navy.mil) knows a lot about Linux, the Extensa 570, and X-Windows.

Matteo Vaccari (matteo@dotto.usr.dsi.unimi.it) provided a great deal of help in assembling the files and information in these pages.

David Goldschmidt (gold@ccr-p.ida.org) passed on his experience installing Linux directly from the Windows '95 "dos mode".

James Brundell (james@physics.otago.ac.nz) has gotten suspend-to-disk working for Linux.

John Brockmeyer (jab@swcp.com) has a solution to some IRQ and PCMCIA problems encounted with the Extensa.

VIII. Credits This page was written by Charles Roth, who may be reached at roth@gamgee.acad.emich.edu.

It was last revised on 9 January 1997.  Please drop me a line if this page was at all useful to you, especially if you have any information to add!