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How to install Red Hat Linux 4.2 on the PC110 palmtop.
Red Hat Linux Installation

 Firstly you will need another machine to install from, or to make the install disks, unless you happen to have the right kind of parallel port CD-ROM drive.

I chose to do a PLIP based install from another Linux machine. For this you need parallel ports with interrupts enabled and a turbo laplink cable. Configure a PLIP interface on your machine with the CD-ROM and also do an ifconfig plip<x> arp.

Firstly you need to set the BIOS configuration. Boot the machine and hold down F1. You will get a graphical configuration setup. Select the boot options, select reset, then add devices in the order floppy, internal disk drive, PCMCIA drive. If the machine tries to boot from hdc first, which is its default configuration setting this will confuse LILO which "knows" that PC's boot from hda. Save the BIOS configuration.

On the PC110 boot off the install floppy and select a network install. Select PLIP for the device and then add "irq=7" as the arguments if you are using the standard parallel port settings in the PC110 BIOS (recommended as I'll explain later). Set the IP addresses when you are asked for them and for the NFS mount give the path to the CDROM. Depending on your configuration you may need to export the CDROM from the server first.

To export the CDROM edit /etc/exports and include the line 

/mnt/cdrom	w.x.y.z(ro)
where w.x.y.z is the IP address of the host you intend to install. As root type 
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs stop
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs start
to restart the NFS services. Now continue the install. If you have this set up correctly the message "In stage 2 install.." will be displayed followed by the install menu. From here on it is mostly plain sailing. Drive /dev/hdc is the PCMCIA disk drive. /dev/hda has Personaware on it and is probably best left as is.

When you are asked about devices. You need to know the following:

I however installed Metrolink MetroX off the CD-ROM and this handles the chip very well. Set the mouse to be PS/2, two buttons emulate three, /dev/psaux and the video card to be CT 65535 on LCD Panel. You now have X set up fine except for the keyboard maps which can be fixed later.

Currently you need to use MetroX 3.1.2 or earlier. We think theres a memory mapping problem on the PC110 and the video as Win95 has similar problems. At some point soon I'll dig around the newest MetroX/XFree drivers and turn things off until it wants to work. If you have Red Hat 4.2 CD ask <support@redhat.com> if they can provide you the MetroX rpm files from Redhat 4.1 instead of the standard one.

The LILO setup you probably want is Linux boot off /dev/hdc, DOS on /dev/hda1 and install LILO on /dev/hda.

Pick a root password made of ascii characters that are the same in all keymaps just in case. After the reboot the machine should boot fine into Linux off the hdc drive and still boot Personaware off hda.

Having installed you want to build your own kernel. Especially if you have a 4 or 8Mb PC110. The specific things to watch are: