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Graphic by: Jenny Conner |
Last week we talked about partitioning the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop and then installing Linux and Windows to create a dual-booting system. This week, we'll get to see if it all worked.
When I rebooted my computer, Lilo came up with two choices for me to pick from. I tried windows first. After it loaded I was greeted with the generic "rolling hills" desktop and the windows xp style start menu. This was the first thing to get changed - I right clicked on the start menu to customize it, chose the classic windows style, and several icons appeared on the screen. Everything seemed to be working fine.
Because I didn't use the reinstall disk that came with my computer, I had to go to Toshiba's website to download the drivers for my hardware. I installed a driver for my modem, ethernet card, and touchpad, among others. Then, I noticed my first problem.
Although my usb Apple mouse was working, when I plugged in other usb devices like a pin drive, or the 20GB external hard drive I had backed up all my data on, the system would not recognize it. At first, I could not determine the source of the problem. I figured I should reboot and boot Linux before I became too irritated with the problem.
The first problem I noticed in Linux was that I didn't have touchpad support in Gnome, my X window system of choice. My one-button Apple usb mouse worked fine, but what if I needed to right click? Without the touchpad, I had no right mouse button. During the installation I mistakedly told the system that the default mouse was the usb mouse, since I was using it during the installation. If I ever had my laptop on the go, as laptops often are, however, I would have no mouse whatsoever. Hindsight's always more clear, I guess.
I wanted both the usb mouse and the touchpad to work at the same time, so I could move the pointer with the usb mouse and right click if necessary with the touchpad. In order to get both mice working concurrently, I had to modify the "ServerLayout" section of the XF86Config file. The following lines added to either /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config set up the touchpad as the main pointer and the usb mouse as the secondary one:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ps/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/misc/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "imps/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Mouse1" "SendCoreEvents"
Problem 2 fixed, problem 1 still uncertain. Feeling sucessful, I tried to mount my external usb hard drive in linux. No such luck. I figured I would tackle that problem last, as it was the one that eluded me the most.
Problem 3, the last problem, was the lack of sound in linux. Usually, sound is muted by default. Running a command "alsamixer" opens a sound mixer that controls the master volume. Pressing the M key unmutes a volume control, and the up/down arrows are used to specify its volume. Knowing this, I ran alsamixer with my Gnome's command line console and got the error "no mixer elems found." After some research I found that I had to blacklist my sound module. The hotplug system was using the wrong module to acces the sound card, so I had to put that wrong module on a list in a file, called a blacklist, to keep the hotplug system from using it.
I added the incorrect sound module, snd-intel8x0m, to the blacklist file stored at /etc/hotplug/blacklist. Now sound works, rock on!
But still, no usb drives. I went back to windows to investigate the problem, since my geek chick's intuition told me I'd find the answer there somewhere. In the list of hardware in my "system" configuration area, usb was called an "unknown device." I investigated this area further and told the system to install drivers automatically. After rebooting, I was able to read from usb drives in windows, and mount them in linux.
Currently, dual booting system is working just fine. This very article I am typing in Gnome. Overall, the project was a great success. Here's a few of my system specifications:
Toshiba Satellite 2435 Laptop
2.4ghz Intel pentium processor
512 MB ram
40GB Hard drive: 28 GB Windows, 8GB Linux, 4GB Swap
Slackware Linux 10.0 and Gnome 2.6
Windows XP Professional Edition, Service Pack 2
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Adventures in Dual Booting, Part II