Gateway Solo 9550

LinuxMCE Stuff

Tested 0710 Beta 4 and 0704

• UI2 over VGA out
• Audio
• NIC with PXE boot
• Diskless booting

Untested

• Svideo Out
• SPDIF Out

Unique Use Of Hardware

Pulled out hard drive, floppy drive and CD-ROM to make it a diskless PXE station with no noise. Fan on CPU still spins occasionally. I plan to completely remove the motherboard from the laptop shell in hopes to keep temp low enough so the fan will not spin at all. Then I should be able to tuck this behind the TV and viola! fanless, diskless media director.

Special Config Note

To get Nvidia driver working (specific to diskless booting)

1. Connect laptop to external monitor (this will be the default used unless you change it)
2. Config diskless booting on Core as needed.
3. Startup laptop and go out to eat while it does its' thing.
4. Go through AVWizard and answer all questions, select UI2, and perform reboot (and wait again!)
   1. After reboot it will fail with an OpenGL message
5. Drop to terminal via CTRL-ALT-F2 and login with username 'linuxmce' and password 'linuxmce'
6. Switch to superuser via 'su' command
7. Kill all LinuxMCE processes via 'telinit 1' so you can actually work without being interrupted.
8. Download latest Nvidea 96.43.x drivers (legacy)
   1. CD to /root 'cd /root'
   2. Download Nvidia drives via 'wget "http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/96.43.05/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.05-pkg1.run"'
9. Perform the following updates
   1. 'sudo apt-get install build-essential'
   2. 'sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)'
   3. 'sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-dev'
   4. 'sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-glx'
10. Make a backup copy of xorg.conf
    1. 'cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.backup.conf'
11. Install Nvidia drivers and answer all questions
    1. './NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.05-pkg1.run'
    2. Just choose yes to everything, kernel download check, update xorg.conf, etc.
12. Reboot
    1. 'reboot now'
13. Enjoy

Laptop Specs

• Processor: Intel Mobile Pentium III or Celeron 1.13Ghz
• Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce2 GO, 32 MB SGRAM, TV out via RCA, VGA out (use legacy 96.43 Nvidia drivers!)
• Audio: ESS ES1988 - S/PDIF - 5.1 Digital
• Bus speed: 100 MHz front side bus
• Memory: Expandable to 512 MB. Two SO-DIMM slots
• LCD: 15 inch