Digital HiNote Ultra II

The Hardware

It looks like these were offered in several forms. Processors were Intel P120 or 133, directly mounted onto a beautiful SMT mainboard. Screens were LCD in either 10.4 inch or 11.2 inch sizes. External Floppy drive mounts underneath and is detachable. This provides a comfortable working angle when installed. An external MultiMedia dock also mounted underneath and added 3 speakers plus a 6 speed CD-ROM. The systems came with 8Mb ram soldered on the MB and 2 sockets for up to 32Mb (2x 16Mb 72pin 3.3v) for a total of 40Mb of ram.

A floppy or a cdrom module is required to install any software. The HiNote has a BIOS option to boot a pcmcia device, but I do not have anything like that so I cannot say that works.

If just a floppy is available, another computer hosting NFS is required to host the Slackware files. RedHat, Mandrake and Debian support FTP installs over the internet.

Another alternative that works with Slackware is to get a 32Mb or larger Compact Flash Card, a pcmcia-cf adapter and a cf reader. Connect the cf reader to the pc, load the A file set on cf card. Insert cf card into pcmcia adapter and then insert that into the pcmcia slot. Boot using floppies, select 'Install from mounted HD' and select the cf disk.

Specifications

• Intel Pentium 120 or 133 Mhz cpu
• 8-40 Mb of RAM
• 1.0 or 1.3 Gb hard drive
• Sound Blaster compatible sound chip (ESS)
• 10.4 or 11.2 inch LCD, 800x600, 256 colors
• 2 pcmcia slots, serial, vga out, external dock connector
• external 1.44Mb floppy that is removable
• external CD-ROM dock that is removable

The HiNote Ultra weighs about 4.5 lbs with external floppy and battery mounted. About 3.5 lbs with them removed. The external AC power supply is very light and small, not the usual 1 pound brick.

The gear is getting a bit hard to find, and information even harder.

Shopping

To check for the supervisor password press 'FN + F3' on the bootup screen. If you get a Blue Box with 'Enter Supervisor Password' across the top, either ask the sales person what the pw is, or knock $100 off the price.

Slackware 8.0

The Trick

I installed Slackware 8 on my HiNote. The trick is to make sure that a pcmcia ethernet card is supported by pcmcia_cs v3.1.26. The first card I tried did not and was giving me fits. But a second card was supported and life was better. Use the bareapm.i for the boot disk. Use the color.gz for the root disk, and make a copy of the pcmcia.dsk disk.

Booting Up

Boot using the bareapm.i root and color.gz root disks respectively. At the prompt login as root. Insert the pcmcia.dsk and enter 'pcmcia' to load the pcmcia drivers. The ethernet card should show connection lights, and you should hear 2 beeps.

Start Setup

Type 'setup' to begin. Follow the directions until 'Select Source'.

Select Source

Here select 'Install from NFS'. Enter the network parameters for the NFS mount and the laptop network IP. Using 10baseT my NFS wouldn't work well on 9+Mb files. So I had to get the basics up, A series, tcpip1.tgz, and D series. Then load the latest pcmcia_cs code. Compile that so I could use the 100BaseT network card. Then install the rest from there.
UPDATE: On the second HiNote I got, I installed the Base system from Slackware 8, everything except X, configured and rebooted. Then I changed CDs from Slackware 8 to Slackware 7.1 in my server. Remounted NFS and reran 'setup'. Then installed XFree 3.3.6 and X Apps. This all ran fine on a tiny 10BaseT pcmcia card.

Configuration

X Windows

XFree 4.0.1 did not work even though the Chips and Technologies C65548 is supported. I had to drop back and use 3.3.6 from Slackware 7.1. Using this version is a simple install, then run /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config. Select monitor extended SVGA, vertical 50-90, ps-2 mouse, US 101 kb, and SVGA server. Chipset 193, video memory 1024. After running X for a few days it began to lockup in Opera. So I went in and fiddled with some of the options in /etc/XF86Config. Turning off 'Option BitBlt' seems to have fixed the lockups.

Window Manager

I tried Blackbox but the default dithering looks bad. So I tried IceWM and its much better suited to 256 colors. FVWM and FVWM95 are also good choices.

Sound

Use the SB modules. The default values are io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1. These can be seen in the BIOS under 'Audio'. To adjust the sound volume and such get 'aumix' from freshmeat. Or use the keys on the keyboard (duh to me).

IRdA

I have not done this yet. It seems to be supported, the kernel detects it ok, but I haven't managed to get the utils loaded properly.

DisAssembly