Linux On The Palmax 1100

Introduction

The Palmax 1100 is a Cyrix MediaGX based palm/mini-notebook PC. I picked it for a new portable development machine to replace the IBM PC110 for several reasons.

• The MediaGX is a relatively standard component, so there are less suprises along the way.
• It supports 2.5" hard disk unlike the PC110. This makes more than 512Mb of disk space available at sane prices.
• It has a sensible mouse interface. The PC110 mouse was bad enough that we wrote a fake mouse driver for the little touchpad it has. The Palmax 1100 uses a touchscreen interface.
• With the high capacity battery pack you get four hours of battery life. Reports on the net and local testing indicate that you really do get three or four hours of life.
• It comes in black.

Installing Linux

I did a Red Hat install using the Lorax beta snapshot. Red Hat 6.0 also works fine. The install was done via CD.

If you are using Lorax pick a text mode install. The machine is standard IDE with an IDE hard disk and CD. The installer will do almost everything automatically for you.

The touchpad mouse is not supported by Red Hat. Don't worry about this. The solution will be explained later. The X server works with the PS/2 mouse on the expansion unit and it is quite usable in this setup. Only 8bit depth works currently. It isn't clear if this is a bug in the X server, in the Cyrix VSA or both.

To get the touchpad working download the Xserver listed in the links section.

Audio does not work out of the box. You need to patch and recompile a kernel or use Linux kernel version 2.2.13pre6 or higher to fix this. This is a Cyrix MediGX emulation bug. Another Cyrix MediaGX emulation bug prevents recording from working. That one I've yet to find a cure for.

Compatibility

Compatibility is always an issue with Linux on mini-notebook machines. Vendors pull a lot of tricks to get the machines small enough and low powered enough. The Palmax 1100 fares very well.

Floppy Drive

The floppy drive in the base unit works with Linux. It is a little odd as you can't use both parallel port and floppy together. However it is fully compatible.

CD-ROM

The CD-ROM in the base station is IDE and appears as /dev/hdc. The only problem here is you need to power off to add/remove the base station. The unit is heavily oriented to suspend-to-disk which doesn't work on Linux.

Hard Disk

A 2.5" drive. It can support UDMA but the BIOS does not enable UDMA support and Linux does not know how to enable UDMA on it. Transfer rate in PIO mode is about 2.5Mbytes/second. UDMA is now supported in 2.2.15pre kernels.

Audio

The MediaGX claims to be Soundblaster 16 compatible. It isn't terribly compatible however. I have been working on the MediaGX sound bugs and have the playback side fixed. It turns out that.

• The MediaGX incorrectly emulates the DMA behaviour of a Soundblaster causing a phut-phut like noise across things like MP3 playback. I have added a work around for this.
• The MediaGX crashes if you issue a recording command before enabling the recording DMA channel. The Soundblaster waits. I have cured this but there are other recording side problems it seems. A provisional fix for this is in 2.2.15.
• The MediaGX uart401 is incorrectly handled. It is possible to work around this by setting it to disabled. Not yet added to the driver but you can set "mpu_io=0xF00" and it will give a non fatal error and disable the MPU401/UART401 facility for you. On 2.2.13pre6 and higher this is fixed.

I now have quite usable audio playback.

Video

8bit video works fine except for some colour problems on console switches. 16bit mode only works with a virtual width set to 1024 pixels. I looked into this one and it appears to die deep in Cyrix magic firmware. Use the 3.3.3.1 SVGA X Server. I'll put up a fixed 3.3.5 server for the Palmax shortly. In the meantime the simple workaround is to set a virtual screen, which forces off the compressed video that breaks the X server. If you don't want a virtual screen set the depth to 641 lines. You'll not notice the one line extra.

The Cyrix MediaGX does not have text modes but emulates them at a very low level. On the Palmax 1100 this works fine in Linux.

Keyboard

The keyboard has a very odd layout and 77 keys. The layout takes a bit of getting used to, but the 77 key keyboard means it has something close to real keys unlike the PC110. The layout is magically mapped by the firmware and the normal UK keymap just works. Suprising and convenient.

Power Management

This works fine under Linux. It wants to use ACPI but you can enable APM support in the BIOS for Linux. Suspend works as does the screen blanking. The hot key for suspend works fine. Suspend to disk does not work in Linux. I plan to try using the Linux swsuspend patches instead. The lack of suspend to disk is the biggest downpoint I have found.

The BIOS allows to underclock the CPU but this requires a reset so is nothing like as convenient as the speed hotkeys on the PC110. It would be nice to know how to set the CPU speeds in Linux.

The extended battery pack claims a four hour running time. Playing games in X11 and doing general work suggests that the claim is reasonable, although probably not true for building kernels. I run the machine with "noatime" set on the root file system, and a 1.5 minute spindown on the disk. Also its worth remembering to set the screeensaver to power down the display and not do fancy graphics.

Pen Input

You can download a special XInput device for the Pen device on the Palmax 1000. With this installed on the Palmax 1100 the pen works beautifully. Accuracy is acceptable and then pen is a lot nicer than the mouse on many of the small laptops.

PCMCIA

The PCMCIA controller works with the Linux pcmcia_cs just fine. Under Red Hat everything simply worked once I enabled PCMCIA and set it to intel style. You get a single type II slot. Ideal for a network card.

IRDA

Itai Nahshon reports that the IRDA works fine with 2.2.14 plus 2.2.14-irda1 patches (thus 2.2.15pre). The Palmax uses an NSC PC97338VJG controller for serial, floppy and parallel. This works in IRDA mode by doing

setserial /dev/ttyS1 uart unknown
modprobe nsc_fir dongle_id=9
irmanager &
ifconfig irda0 up

USB

The Linux 2.3.x USB works on the Palmax. I have some problems with the current development code when doing a suspend and using USB.

Conclusions

The Palmax 1100 is a nice Linux palmtop. There are rough edges in the Cyrix MediaGX support in the sound and video but they are not fatal. The hardware works well and has no obvious nasty surprises for non-windows users.

The two big downers are the lack of suspend to disk under Linux and the continued inability of Cyrix to provide accurate working emulation in their firmware.

There is a Linux suspend to disk patch so I am working on getting this going nicely on the Palmax 1100. Cyrix however appear to be incurable.

Update: Cyrix have now provided the information to let Mark Lord get UDMA working on their 5530 chipset. They have also provided me with enough info to hopefully work around the audio bugs. With these in place the Palmax is basically totally supported in Linux. The only missing piece is BIOS suspend to disk.

Links

mount -o remount,rw,noatime /
/sbin/hdparm -S 15 /dev/hda
/sbin/hdparm -u 1 /dev/hda
/usr/local/sbin/set6x86 -p 0xC2 -s 0x08