Hi there,

I am trying to install gentoo on my trusty new laptop.
I have tried both the LiveCD and the minimalCD but both "hard-lockup" when half way through the hardware detection sequence.
I have tried many options passed to the kernel but i decided to run
Code:
gentoo nodetect
and work from there.

So i have done that, and the first thing i need todo is get a working net connection. The laptop comes with both a LAN card and a wireless card. I have, with the button at the front, turned off the wireless card to simplyfy things for now.The LAN card is a "Realtek Semiconductor RTL-8139/8139c/8139c+ (Rev 10)" in it so i tried the following.

Code:
modprobe 8139cp

It told me that it wasnt compatible and i should try the "8139too" driver.

So i did
Code:
modprobe 8139too


....and the thing lockup up hard. You can only get it to turn off by pulling the power.

I am guessing/hoping that this is what caused the lockups in the hardware detection. However i am now stumped and not sure how to proceed.


I have tried Ubuntu and Knoppix (I beleive the gentoo hardware detection is borrowed from knoppix anyway) but no go.

Can you point me in the right direction ?

Thanks alot, your time is really appreciated.

Take Care
G_N

I'm having some trouble with the same machine. I believe there is an irq conflict with the DVD drive and the wireless card.

I tried SuSE with not much sucess - it was hanging at hw detection - kept telling me "searching for info file"

Last night I think I cracked it though! I tried with the SuSE safe settings, plus pci=noirq, turned off the wireless card and plugged the machine directly into my router (it had previously got past hw detection, only to hang at network detection).

Didn't go as far as doing the whole install, as it was time for sleep by then, but it got as far as the whole graphical screen in Yast where you pick the packages, etc.

Not much experience with gentoo, but try pci=noirq, rather than gentoo nodetect, and see if i you have any more sucess.

Rich

I'll post my updates in this thread - the wife has the machine away at work with her. Should have something to tell you on Thursday or Friday.

Hi there Richey,

Thanks for your input. If we work together we could come to a conclusion to this faster.
You can't pass pci=noirq to the kernel on the boot, its not a command it recognises.
I downloaded the openSuse 10.1 minimal net CD to give it a try but it hung, even when i tried your trick. Maybe i missed something, maybe your using a different CD??

Keep me upto date on any progress as i will when i learn more.

Take Care G_N

Hi there, I recently picked up a freevents x53 and have instantly run into what sounds like the same issue. I can follow the process described by Ginja_Ninja to boot gentoo without detection, and modprobe the 8139too driver to get an instant hang.
I was wondering if anyone had made any further progress tracking this problem down?

The annoying thing is that I don't even really need the ethernet working, assuming I can get the wifi driver working ok.

If you had any further success I'd love to hear about it!

Ok so I figured I'd post a follow up to my own note incase it helps anyone else.
I've had a merry old game with this one. the main issue is some problem that causes the whole system to hand whenever 8139too is modprobe'd. Unfortunatly since this is the 'right' driver for the realtek card in the philips x53 (and presumable x51/52) this gets done as part of hardware detection for basically every distro I tried. Whats more if you turn off hardware detection you make your life harder becuase of everything else that doesn't get found.
So... I finally seattled on Gentoo. Sicne the live cd allowed me to boot using
gentoo-nofb
then during the install you can hit 'i' to enter interactive mode. This then allows you to stop the autoconfig step, but retain everything else.

my next problem was that the console install for gentoo failed for me. not idea why, but it got as far as formating the partitions but then failed becomase some files hadn't copied for some reason. anyhow after lots of time and reading and fiddling I finally hit the combination of booting as described above, and using the gui installer. That seemed to work. Which left me with a bootable install (which I still needed to go into interactive mode to stop coldplug running)
The next step was to get some network up. As mentioned previously for some reason the ethernet card locks the system whenever the driver is loaded. I have no idea how to even get more info on that. But since I intended to use wireless anyway I didn't want to waste the time.

So... my next problem was that the ipw3945 driver doesn't come with the default install. I had to go download it. And to build it, I needed the kernel source/headers. but for some reason the live cd installed kernel 2.6.17-r7 but when I atempted to emerge gentoo-sources it loaded 2.6.17-r5. This caused me some issues becuase I didn't notice until I got failures loading modules, which where the worng version for the running kernel.

This process of emerging was *very* slow going, since I needed to use
emerge --pretend --fetchonly <package> 2> download.lst
then copy the download list to another machine, modify it to be a series of http lines
then use wget to download the files. The put them on a usb key and move them back to the x53.

after a great deal of patience I install genkernel, which sucesfully built everything I needed in the 2.6.17-r5 kernel. which I could then configure grub to boot.
I also took the oportunity to do
rc-update del coldplug boot
to stop having to enter interactive mode to stop the whole thing hanging.
so finally I rebooted into a kernel for which I had the compiled source. This meant I could finally compile the ipw3945 driver (and associated ieee80211 stuff) and hurrah a modprobe later I had a network card detected!
then I just had to find the dhcp package (using the above emerge/usbkey process) and then I could dhclient the new interface. and at last a network was found!

so now I'm busy emerging stuff through the much faster process of having a real live network connection. I still have much to do (sound for one) but now I ahve a running gnome session with network the rest feels like it should be ok (he says jinxing himself)

anyway hope that helps anyone else and stops them spending quite the number of hours I've spent to get this configured..

I'm not sure that I'm ready for Gentoo just yet! If it was my own machine I would probably try it for the challenge, but my wife needs it for work. I got the machine to go through the first part of installing SuSE 10.1, but when it rebooted for the first time, it hung when loading the ethernet driver. It gave an error message for the wireless driver too.

I think it was trying to load 8139cp, not 8139too. I think udev is also partially responsible for loading all the devices at the same time. If anyone else has suggestions I'd be willing to hear them, but at the minute it is going to be a windows machine, albeit with GIMP, Lyx, Open Office, and some decent AV and firewall.

I have the same laptop/problem. The solution is to enable the "Use older RX-reset method" option (CONFIG_8139TOO_OLD_RX_RESET) for the 8139too driver. Works just fine now!

Nice one! Which distro did you install on it? Do you put that command on the grub command line?

Arch Linux. You have to recompile the kernel. It is unfortunate that the the distros I have tried have had this option disabled (including Arch).

BTW this is on the X53 but I assume that the X52 has the exact same network card.

hi,in suse 10.2 alpha 5 that CONFIG_8139TOO_OLD_RX_RESET don't seem to help,but i've found workaround to boot-move away from modules(delete) 8139too.ko and sdhci.ko (the second is for sd/mmc slot)...quick and dirty
this works for my philips freevents x53cz ,this is probably original: w w w twinhead.com.tw/product_notebook/H12Y.asp

paja_slovany, could you please elaborate how you did this? Does everything work in OpenSUSE 10.2 in terms of hardware - ie. wireless, ethernet, card reader etc? Have you managed to install it successfully?

Kind regards

Lee

Hello everybody!

I have used Gentoo linux as my desktop for 4 years and it was hard to accept that linux would not work on the new philips x56.
I tried a few distros no luck, as somebody else has said in the forum I could not live only on windows.
Then I tried to install FreeBSD. So far I had used FreeBSD as a server for my local network.
The installation of FreeBSD went fine, it rebooted then I started to build the system(users of gentoo should be familiar with it).
Then installed KDE,Gnome,OpenOffice and everything I needed.
Configured the sound server,got 1280x800 resolution and in the end cofigured wi-fi.
Everything works fine. I will use FreeBSD as my desktop from now on, or at least as long as Gentoo will start having support for it.

try for yourself www.freebsd.org install 6.1 version then download the latest ports from any of their mirrors, this way you will make sure to have the latest software installed in your system.

Somebody else in this forum has asked which distros install and which don't install on philips x5*?
I personally think linux has not support yet for all the hardware that is present in the philips x5* series. I'm sure soon they will.

Ok so a little while ago I re-looked at this and using the above info regarding the old RX reset method I recompiled the kernel. It didn't help ;-( but I took at look at the other options and there is another a couple above that one. I forget the option name, and I'm not able to double check it right now. but it was to do with whether or not you share memory with other pci devices. I'm pretty convinced that this is the thing that causes the ethernet to hang the whole system. I switched the option on to stop it sharing and presto, ethernet works great.
For the record I also successfully got hardware accelleration out of the built in graphics card, enough to get unreal tournament working pretty nicely.
So at this point the system has fully working ethernet/wifi/graphics/sound I've not even looked at the built in sd card reader stuff so no idea about that.
but I'd regard this as a fully working laptop under linux.

Could you please describe in more detail how you did this? Which distro did you use?

Kind regards,

Lee