Tedi Heriyanto 1
December 19, 2001
My Mitac 7170 died on the first week of June 2003 after it was working for 1.5 years. The computer dealer (Imperial Computer) where I bought this notebook couldn't find the problem and they didn't give me the best solution on this matter.
My suggestion : DO NOT buy Mitac Computer! if you do not have a lot of money. :)
Recently, I have just bought a notebook from an Indonesian computer dealer. The notebook is Mitac 7170. The Mitac website has no information about this model.
Why I bought this notebook ? Because :
The notebook is preinstalled with Windows ME. I didn't want to erase it, because I have already buy the software license and may be someday this operating system will give me a fortune. :)
I also want to install Red Hat 7.2 because I use to it, so the only way to install both operating systems is to make "dual system".
I used fips program to partition my disk into two : 3 GB (for Windows) and 17 GB (for Linux).
Here are the steps :
Now we're ready to install Red Hat 7.2. Please put the RH CD to the CD drive, and make sure that the boot will run from the CD.
After booting to the Red Hat 7.2, I pressed Enter key when asked on Linux installation type.
The most complicated and important thing in doing Linux installation is "disk partitioning". Below are my partitions for Linux installation :
Partition Size / 650 MB /boot 50 MB /home 4000 MB /usr 3000 MB /usr/local 2500 MB /var 500 MB swap 256 MB
My partitions after they have been mounted on Linux :
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda7 656144 84212 538600 14% / /dev/hda2 46668 5960 38299 14% /boot /dev/hda3 4032124 41884 3785412 2% /home /dev/hda5 3020140 1406368 1460356 50% /usr /dev/hda6 2522048 32944 2360988 2% /usr/local /dev/hda8 497829 31892 440235 7% /var
In general, all of the hardware in Mitac 7170 are detected. And I have no difficult problem to setup the hardware in Linux, except for the internal modem included with the notebook.
During the install process, because I don't know about the VGA card, I cannot install the appropriate XFree86 program, but after searching in the Internet especially to www.viaarea.com I found out that my notebook is installed with S3 Savage VGA Card.
Then I configure it using "Xconfigurator", below is the information I supply to the Xconfigurator:
VGA Card : S3 Savage (generic) Monitor Type : Generic Laptop Display Panel 1024x768 Video Mode : 24 bit Video Memory : 8MB
The card is detected as VIA Technologies, AC97 Audio Controller.
Below is the information I got from doing "lspci -v" as root.
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC97 Audio Controller (rev 40)
Subsystem: Mitac: Unknown device 7170
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 5
I/O ports at 1000 [size=256]
I/O ports at 1c34 [size=4]
I/O ports at 1c30 [size=4]
Capabilities: [c0] Power Management version 2
Works like magic, you just need to :
The kernel automatically installed the appropriate modules for the USB :
Module Size Used by usb-storage 39008 0 scsi_mod 95696 3 [sr_mod ide-scsi usb-storage] usb-uhci 21536 0 (unused) usbcore 51712 1 [usb-storage usb-uhci]
In order to mount the floppy automatically, I added the following to /etc/fstab :
/dev/sda /mnt/usbfd auto noauto,user 0 0
Then you can access the floppy under /mnt/usbfd directory.
Module Size Used by yenta_socket 9488 1 pcmcia_core 41600 0 [ds yenta_socket]
I don't have PCMCIA device to test it further.
The ethernet card is detected as Via-rhine :
[root@stealth tedi]# /sbin/lsmod Module Size Used by via-rhine 11424 1
Unfortunately I haven't got a chance to test it further.
It was detected, but I haven't tested it further.
This hardware is still not working. I don't know what's wrong, although it is listed after I did "/sbin/lspci", I still cannot dial out using "wvdial" program. :((
[root@stealth tedi]# /sbin/lspci 00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC97 Modem Controller (rev 20)
Using driver from www.linmodems.org, and still not working.
The drawbacks for this model are :