Manicai.net
This article is very old and the laptop got stolen before I finished it. It remains in case it of use to someone somewhere but I'm afraid I won't be able to answer any specific questions about the information here.
There are already several pages around that give some details on how to do install Linux on a C600. All of these were useful to some extent during my attempts, but none address all the problems I had. Most of these problems stemmed from the fact I decided to install Debian rather than something nice and easy (like SuSe).
Having heard that Debian's hardware detection and support lagged other distrubtions a bit, my initial plan was to use the (now defunct) Progeny variant that promised better support. This failed because the Progeny graphical installer did not want to display at all. I therefore reverted to using Debian 2.2r3.
Most of the initial installation is easy, the only points where you have to make a decision are the partitions and kernel modules. For the later I picked maestro3 from the misc selection to enable the sound card.
However I couldn't get Debian to correctly configure and run X, this may be because it is still using V3.3 or just that I ran out of patience before hitting the magical combination of parameters.
The first time I hit this I upgraded the distrubtion to Progeny using the instruction is the Progeny install guide. This gave me the XFree version 4.0.2 which ran out of the box, although some hacking around with the configuration was needed.
The first time I did the installation the mouse refused to work under X. This was fixed by uninstalling GPM (I'd never use it anyway) and set the device option in XF86Config-4 to use "/dev/psaux" rather than "/dev/mouse".
I general the keyboard worked okay but I am having problems with shift-3 (the pound sign for GB keyboards) in xterm (it seems okay in XEmacs so it's not really irritating, just a bit bizarre - it prints # and gives a new line, any solutions welcome). I'm also used to the alt key being the meta key. If your ingrained like me then use xmodmap and this config to fix it.
Progeny decided to stomp all over the kernel Debian had installed. This might not have been a problem, although it did downgrade the version (from 2.2.19pre17 to 2.2.18), but it meant that support for the sound card was lost and some of the Debian packages seg faulted (CMUCL is the one that I use that suffered - I didn't check all 4000 to see if there were more). Thankfully this is easy to fix. The Kernel that is booted is determined by what /vmlinuz links to. For Progeny this /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19 (and it sets /vmlinuz.old as a link to /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19. To undo this delete /vmlinuz and then do
$ ln -s /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19pre17 /vmlinuz $ liloRemember to run lilo otherwise the system will hang on reboot. The downside of this is that the Progeny kernel included power management, which made things a bit nicer.
However then wanting to go use some of the packages in the current Debian testing distrubtion (woody), I tried upgrading to that from Progeny, and they really didn't seem to like each other (problems seem to stem from libdb and libreadline). At this point I went back to using pure Debian.
The base installation was as previous (so no working X etc.). I then use apt to do a dist-upgrade to Debian testing and used the latest version of X from X Strike Force repository. This went pretty smoothly and solved the problems with going from Debian to Progeny and back again.
Ideally I'd like to have a journalling file system rather than Ext2. The options seem to be ReiserFS and Ext3. Of these Ext3 sounds nicer as I can convert the current partitions rather than having to backup and reformat. Again I'll need to play with recompiling the kernel to do this.
At this point the laptop got stolen! So I can't continue (it was replaced by an IBM Thinkpad, that I installed SuSe on).
XF86Config-4. You'll probably want to fiddle a little bit with it as I have the a few personal peculiarities in there (like having control and caps lock switched).
Unfortunately most of the sources that I used when I did this are now dead links so your best resort is the Linux on Laptops page that has lots of links and HowTos.