Gericom Silver Shadow or Clevo 3420

My first laptop/notebook!

The Gericom Silver Shadow seems to be the same model as the Clevo 3420 which seems to be same as the 3220, 3620 and their predecessors 3200, 3400 and 3600 except for the enclosures.
I bought my Silver Shadow at Magic Devices.
Front view


Left side: PS/2-keyboard/mouse, CPU-fan-out, USB, PC-Card-slot and line-in, headphones, microphone (the harddisk is behind/above this three jacks)	Rear: Kensington-lock, IrDA, Modem, S-VHS-out, Serial, Parallel, VGA (the last 4 behind a flap), Power	Right side: LiIon-battery, device-bay for DVD or floppy

Hardware

Celeron-500
13.3"-TFT-display 1024x768x16M (ATI Mach64 Rage LT Pro rev 220)
128 MB RAM
20 GB harddisk (TOSHIBA MK2016GAP)
DVD-ROM (TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-C2402)
Weight: 2.3 kg
internal modem (integrated in soundchip ALS-300+)
Size: 30,6 x 23,2 x 3,2 cm
1 PC-Card-slot Type I or II
LiIon-battery with 4.5 Ah
Sound: Avance Logic ALS-300+

Linux

I have installed SuSE 6.4. The installation is simple: Insert disk 1 into the DVD-ROM and boot. Yast2 asks for partitioning. Notice that you need this partition to use the hibernation mode:

/dev/hda1             1        18    144584+  a0  IBM Thinkpad hibernation

This partition can be created three ways:

Linux-fdisk.
lphdisk, a replacement for the next...
PHDISK.EXE, which needs Windows98 or similar to work.

I added a 500 MB swap-partition and several Linux-partitions for /, /boot, /home, /var, /tmp, etc.
After installation I compiled my own kernel with this configuration (/usr/src/linux/.config) and changed some settings in /etc/rc.config.

X11

Yast2 detects the ATI Rage Pro and installs a ready to use /etc/XF86Config.
To use 3D-applications with hardware accelleration this must be added:
Section "Module" Load "glx.so" EndSection and in section "Device":
Option "no_font_cache" Option "no_pixmap_cache"
To get faster touchpad-control I need to add
xset m 4
to my ~/.xinitrc.

To speed up the graphic display, you can use the MTRR:
echo "base=0xfd000000 size=0x800000 type=write-combining" > /proc/mtrr E.g. vice, an C=64-emulator, is speeded up from 39 fps to 65 fps.

APM

I use apmd for a clean suspend. The most important is to let apmd switch from X11 to a console before suspending. This is achieved by this line in /etc/rc.config.d/apmd.rc.config APMD_LEAVE_X_BEFORE_SUSPEND="yes" After the suspend there are two probems:

The X-pointer is somewhat malformed. This can be avoided by using a software-cursor instead of the hardware-cursor by adding this line to the "Device"-section of /etc/XF86Config:
Option "sw_cursor" But the software-cursor has a problem to update the background.
Try both to find out, what is less bugging. Or try a newer XFree. I use 3.3.6
Some sort of timer is running much too slow. There is something very weird going on in the kernel. E.g. an "time sleep 10" takes half a minute an prints out 2 seconds.
Perhaps a newer kernel than 2.2.16 will fix it.

You can spin down the harddisk to save power:
hdparm -S 2 /dev/hda
But the kupdate-process will wake up the disk every 5 seconds to write some buffers.
You can view the current kupdate-settings either with
cat /proc/sys/vm/bdflush
or with
update -d
The documentation is in the kernel (where else?) in /usr/src/linux/fs/buffer.c (Search for "bdflush_param"). The standard-values are
update -4 500 -5 3000 -6 500
what means, that kupdate is activated every 5 seconds and writes normal buffers older than 30 seconds and superblock buffers older than 5 seconds.
Kupdate can be disabled by update -4 0 and the largest interval is one minute (6000) without patching the kernel.
As an alternative you can disable kupdate and run sync by cron or let the disk sync only when there is a disk-access anyway:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

require 5.000;

$sleep_time = 1;
$TRUE  = 1;
$FALSE = 0;

$oldint = 0;
$newint = 0;
while ($TRUE)
{
  sleep $sleep_time;
  open(FH, "/proc/interrupts") || die "Can't open /proc/interrupts.\n";
  ($line) = grep(/ide0/,);
  (undef,$newint) = split(' ',$line);
  close FH;
  if ($newint > $oldint)
  {
    $oldint = $newint;
    print "$newint\n";
    if (! $did_sync)
    {
      print "disk-access. Syncing...\n";
      system('sync');
      $did_sync = $TRUE;
    }
    else
    {
      print "Disk was accessed by myself. Not syncing.\n";
      $did_sync = $FALSE;
    }
  }
}

The best solution is noflushd.

PC-Card-slot

The PC-Card-slot is is a "Ricoh RL5C475 rev 80" and is recognized by pcmcia-cs 3.1.11 and newer (or even earlier versions, too).

Sound

The soundcard Avance Logic ALS 300+ is supported by OSS version 3.9.3o and newer.
Unfortunately Avance Logic does not release documentation for this chip, so there will be no ALSA-support in the nearer future.

DVD and floppy

The DVD-drive works as /dev/hdb like an normal ATAPI-CDROM without a special driver.
It can be hot-swapped with the floppy-drive. You only need to make sure, that the drive is not mounted, or you will get a kernel-panic. The floppy is a normal floppy and appears as /dev/fd0. No special driver is required.

IrDA

I have only tried to load the modules irtty and irport and that seems to work. Unfortunately I have no IR-device to test this.

Modem (internal)

The internal modem is a sub-function of the sound-chip ALS-300+. In /proc/pci you will see it:

Bus 0, device 9, function 1:
Input device controller: Avance Unknown device (rev 0).
Vendor id=4005. Device id=309.
Medium devsel.
I/O at 0x1400 [0x1401].

There is a driver for Linux at www.smlink.com, but I have not tested it yet.

TV-out

The TV-out is a S-VHS jack. In the BIOS-setup you can select between PAL and NTSC. With Fn+F7 the display can be toggled beween LCD, external Monitor and TV-out. This works without any special driver.

PS/2-port

While Linux is running you can hot-plug e.g. a PS/2-mouse and use it in parallel with the touchpad.

USB

The USB-Port is recognised by Linux. (I have no USB-devices to test it further.)

Untested

The following components are untested, because I either don't need them or have no external device to test it:

VGA-port
printer-port
DVD