Lucid Tips

I recently decided to rebuild my trusted little Compaq Armada M300 laptop and thought might give Ubuntu another try. Since the laptop is only 500 Mhz with 128 MB RAM XUbuntu is a better candidate as compared to Ubuntu. My earlier attempt of installing XUbuntu had not been very successful but this time I managed to get things working

I happen to have the optional Mobile Expansion Unit (MEU) for docking the M300 and hence can use the CD ROM drive. If you do not have the Mobile Expansion Unit and have a purely disk less M300 you can still install XUbuntu on it although it is a bit more complicated. See UbuntuGeek’s post on Installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu/Xubuntu without CDROM Drive.

M300 does not have enough horsepower so install via Live CD does not work. Use Alternate install CD instead. During the install process the detection of the network adapter fails. Ignore this error and continue with the install. The rest of the install should go smoothly.

When XUbuntu starts 2 things do not work correctly – the network adapter and the sound card. Both of this can be fixed by loading the appropriate modules.

First step is to identify the type of network adapter and sound card. To do this open the terminal window and run the command lspci

lucidtipster@lucidtips:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (AGP disabled) (rev 03)
00:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1211
00:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage LT Pro (rev dc)
00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03)
00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1978 Maestro 2E (rev 10)
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100 (rev 09)
00:09.1 Serial controller: Agere Systems LT WinModem

The listing above tells us that the network adapter is Intel Pro/100+ Mini PCI Ethernet and the sound card is ESS Maestro 2E sound card

To load the module for network adapter. Open the command prompt and run the command

sudo modprobe eepro100

At this time if you do not see any error message your network adapter should be working. If you are configured for DHCP you should have aquired an IP address. To check open the terminal window and run the command

ifconfig

If you did get an IP successfully you should be able to browse the internet. If you did not get an IP try running the following commands.

sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifup eth0

Now again check if you have acquired an IP. One down and one to go … To load the module for sound card open the command prompt and run the command

sudo modprobe snd-es1968

If you do not see any error message your sound card too should be working as well. Download sample.ogg to test the sound.

To make sure both these modules are loaded automatically upon system boot up modify the /etc/modules file and add the following lines to it.

eepro100
snd-es1968

To edit the /etc/modules file using vi the command is

sudo vi /etc/modules

The content of my /etc/modules file is listed below

lucidtipster@lucidtips:~$ cat /etc/modules
# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

loop
lp
fuse
eepro100
snd-es1968

Lastly my M300 had old BIOS from 1999 and I would get an error message during booting. I managed to fix this by downloading and upgrading to the latest BIOS. This too turned out to be a little tricky because I had to make a bootable CD with the BIOS upgrade on it.

Update 26-Jan-2009 – By popular demand I am adding ISO image and BIOS Upgrade Instructions

1. Download ISO for bootable CD with BIOS upgrade
2. Burn CD from the ISO image
3. Boot using CD
4. Change to X Drive
5. Change to M300 directory
6. Run ROMPAQ.EXE to launch the BIOS upgrade program

Good luck!!!