Running Debian on a Compaq Evo110

The Evo 110 is a classic Compaq Laptop of old - built like a brick shithouse. You can take it into a bar and use it as a club to fight your way out with it. It may even work after that. It is not guaranteed to work, but it may. So while not as sturdy as the similarly looking Armadas, it can take some serious punishment and live through it. All this in mind it is no surprise that it does not win beauty contests.

The sturdiness combined with the ability to unfold 180 degrees makes it the perfect choice for a kitchen computer. The sub-10W idle power consumption helps as well. I even used to have it straight in the middle of the food preparation area above the kettles at one point. It survived that without any problems and I moved it only because the steam from the kettles was causing some spurious signals from the touchpad. I have moved it to the wiring cubbard door and tied it up there with some garden wire. Overall bill of materials - 48£ for a kitchen stereo + TV + recipe book.

I have now decided to make it portable so it can go in the car instead of a DVD system. This has added 38£ for a Samsung spinpoint to the BOM. Like all old Compaqs it is designed to accept only Hitachi drives. There is a metal wedge in the drive compartment which is specifically designed to make the insertion of Seagates, Fujitsu or WD impossible. As it is no longer possible to find any Hitachi PATA drives this makes upgrading it (and other Compaqs) very problematic. Fortunately, Samsung spinpoint is recessed in the same way as the Hitachi so it can be used instead.

This is the way it looks after being mounted in a DIY harness made out of an old Kiddicare "seat back" lining and some bits of a luggage fixing belt.

Cutouts from the belt used are used to fix the laptop corners and hold it in the harness. The belt was originally for fixing loads to a car rack and is rated to several 100kg so it the laptop is not "going anywhere". Another bit of the same belt holds the contraption to a car head-rest when in the car or is used for hanging it off the hooks around house.

Hardware

The Evo110 is a very weird design for a laptop. It uses a low-end Via+Trident motherboard and some chips are the same as in low-end desktop systems. The CPU is not soldered. Ethernet is on a mPCI, so is the modem, etc. In theory, one can change most parts. For example, the built-in P3 Celery can be changed with any P3/370 CPU. In practice when using a proper P3/1GHz/133 the system barfs because the MB is trying to drive the P3 at 133. Overall - a fairly neat and original low-cost design with one major caveat - the disk is not readily accessible. It is easier to change the CPU than the disk (!?!). It is mounted in a way which requires one to disassemble the whole laptop - disconnect keyboard, remove CD, remove CPU cooler plate, touchpad, even the LCD. I had to go through this to make it diskless prepare it for kitchen media PC use and it was a complete and total nightmare.

aivanov@lorien:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8601 [Apollo ProMedia] (rev 05)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8601 [Apollo ProMedia AGP]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] (rev 22)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 10)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 10)
00:07.4 Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 30)
00:07.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 20)
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
00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade i1 (rev 6a)

There are two big hurdles with regards to using this PC as a media center - the CyberCrap? video adapter and the audio not being isolated from network noise.

On the positive side the CyberCrap? i1 is the Via bigfixed version. It has working hardware cursor and hardware acceleration. This however is disabled in most drivers. As a result one has to recompile the X.org Trident drive with the line which unconditionally turns this off for Cyberblade i1 commented out. It tried to convince the debian maintainer to file this upstream as a bug and allow config file options to override the settings, but to no avail.

The video has a few more bugs - DPMS does not work either. The only way of turning the backlight off when not in use is by switching to a text console using chvt, turning it off using vbetool and switching back using chvt once it is needed on again:

# this turns backlight back on once it has been turned off via vbetool
/usr/bin/chvt 1
/usr/bin/chvt 7

And of course it is a Trident Cybercrap. Combined with a celery CPU it stands no chance to display DVD video at full rate. It needs the video resolution reduced and will happily display files prepared for the iPod, PSP or other media players.

Hibernate

Hibernate on it is broken. The trident video refuses to cooperate and hibernate properly. The backlight does not get turned off. However the chvt +vesa tool trick from above can be used to compensate for that.

This unfortunately is of little help. The most recent BIOS for it does not have ACPI S3 support so it cannot hibernate to RAM. Hibernate to disk (S4) is supported in theory, but in practice does not work. The laptop will hang on resuming at the point where it tries to restore video state. I have tried a few different approaches and decided to give up at the end.

This leaves Sleep (S1) as the only usable acpi low power state. In this state if the VT+vesa hack has been applied the laptop will consume around 8W. Not very good, but not bad either.

Media Center use

It can be used diskless with suitable USB speakers. The network card is not isolated from the audio so when using it diskless with the built-in audio the sound is horrible. It can be used as a TV if the media has been reduced to a suitable resolution so that the CPU + Trident can cope. 2Mbit @ 480x272 MPEG4 is probably the absolute maximum (for reliable use with vlc). At that resolution it will miss a frame once in a while, but still display at a quality that is acceptable on a 1024x768 display. Lower res looks horrible, higher res has unacceptable skips. The limiting factor is most likely the CyberBlade? as the CPU is not loaded to 100%.

The peak on the graph at around 10am corresponds to "Planet Earth" - Shallow Seas episode at 2Mbit @ 480x272 (PSP resolution). The CPU stays at under 50, but there are some lost frames none the less and top shows above 28% io-wait at some points. So that is probably the max that can be pushed through it. The peaks at 6pm and 8pm correspond to 1.2Mbit streams at lower resolutions (encoded for iPod).