Chembook 9780

General info

Warning: There are two Chembook that go by this name. The AMD K6/Mobile Pentium modem and the Pentium II one (9780M). I have gotten reports that the P II model is different, and has among other things an O2Micro PCMCIA chipset, which are known not to work well with linux.
In other words, I do not recommend buying the P II model if you plan to use linux with it (Reported by VA Linux Systems and Doug Morgan).

If you are wondering what the hell a Chembook is, because you've never heard that name, you are just like I was before I got mine. They are sold by a small store in Santa Clara, California (in the Silicon Valley), and don't let this draw you away because they are excellent laptops, and I'm sure Hitron would be more than happy to build a custom one for you and ship it to you.
I think they have 2 or 3 different "shells" depending on whether or not you need swapable bays, and what CPU you want. I can't vouch for the other ones personally, but I know someone who is using a Chembook 3300 without any problems with linux (Nathan Myers, ncm@best.com). Hitron has also told me that they have other people who successfully use their laptops with linux.
On my model, I got to choose the following elements:

• Amount of memory
• Type of CPU
• Type of Battery (the floppy can be removed to insert a second battery of equal capacity and the floppy works on the parallel port, including under linux)
• Hard drive size (up to 8 gig).
• floppy vs LS-120 vs Zip vs second hard drive
• 24X CD-Rom vs 2X/20X DVD (includes MPEG 2 decoding card)

Good things about this laptop:

• You get what you ask (and pay) for, this is by far the best advantage.
• Two swapable bays
• Video in and out (only under windows though)
• The AMD CPU has two fans, one under the laptop to suck air, and one to blow on the side. The laptop will not overheat and crash, even if the bottom fan is prevented from sucking air, like when you set the laptop on a couch or a bed
• You can choose between doze, suspend to RAM and suspend to disk, and you do get all three at once (many other laptops based on the Phoenix bios will only offer suspend to Ram or to disk, depending on what you selected in the bios

Things I didn't really like:

• The sound volume is not a rolling button, it's a function key combinaison
• There is no full mute, PC speaker sound can't be muted without inserting a headphone
• Keyboard layout sucks (backspace too small and space bar also too small because of all the keys on the bottom row)

Tips for using the laptop with linux

BIOS

• PnP OS: yes
• IO/serial 1: enabled / 3F8-IRQ4
• IO/serial 2: enabled / 2F8-IRQ3 / FIR / DMA 3
• IO/parallel: enabled / ECP / 378-IRQ7 / DMA 0
• Audio: SB 220 / WSS 530 / AdLib 388 / MPU 330 / CTRL 100 / DMA 1 / DMA 7 / IRQ 9
• Power Mgnt: enabled / Suspend mode: suspend / Auto Save To Disk: 1H / Battery Low Suspend: S2D

Sound

From my experience, if you suspend to disk while playing sound, sometimes the laptop will resume playing right after it left off, sometimes you will need to stop your sound appplication, unload the modules, and reload them, and sometimes, sound won't work until your power off the laptop.

OSS with older kernels

alias sound ad1848
alias midi opl3
options mpu401 io=0x330
options opl3 io=0x388
options ad1848 io=0x530 irq=9 dma=1

OSS with newer kernels

alias sound opl3sa2
alias midi opl3
options mpu401 io=0x330
options opl3 io=0x388
options sb io=0x220 irq=9 dma=1 dma16=7 mpu_io=0x330
options opl3sa2 io=0x100 mss_io=0x530 irq=9 dma=1 dma2=7 mpu_io=0x330

Alsa drivers

alias char-major-14 snd                                                         
alias snd-minor-oss-0 snd-mixer                                                 
alias snd-minor-oss-3 snd-pcm1-oss                                              
alias snd-minor-oss-4 snd-pcm1-oss                                              
alias snd-minor-oss-5 snd-pcm1-oss                                              
alias snd-minor-oss-12 snd-pcm1-oss                                             
alias snd-card-0 snd-opl3sa

options snd snd_major=14 snd_cards_limit=1
options snd-opl3sa snd_port=0x100 snd_wss_port=0x530 snd_midi_port=0x330 snd_fm_port=0x388 snd_irq=9 snd_dma1=1 snd_dma2=7

Video

By default, the display is messed up, and with versions of Xfree prior to 3.3.3, restore from suspend to disk doesn't work. I got Xfree 3.3.3 and set the following options:

Option "hw_cursor"
Option "use_vclk1"
Option "suspend_hack"

I/O

DMA

 0:	ECP
 1:	MS Sound System
 2:	floppy
 3:	IrDA
 4:	cascade
 5:	free
 6:	free
 7:	MS Sound System

Interrupts

  0:	timer
  1:	keyboard
  2:	cascade
  3:	serial 2 (IrDA)
  4:	serial 1
  5:	PCMCIA card 1
  6:	floppy
  7:	printer (ECP)
  9:	MS Sound System / PCMCIA card 2
 10:	PCMCIA ctrl / MS Sound System
 11:	USB / free
 12:	PS/2 Mouse
 13:	fpu
 14:	ide0
 15:	ide1

PCMCIA

/etc/pcmcia/config.opts

Interrupt driven or polling

The reason why you'd want to do that is to have both IRQ 5 and 9 available for PCMCIA cards, otherwise you won't be able to use two cards which use and interrupt at the same time.

Last updated on May 16th 1999. V 1.3