To do this:

I’ve recently acquired a shiny new Hitachi 7K60 hard disk to go into my laptop. The disk is 60Gb, which will hopefully give me enough space to dual-boot Windows XP and Linux. I ran out of space on the 20Gb disk that the Sony comes with, and I had to remove Linux. The other nice thing about this disk is that it’s a 7200 rpm disk, which should make those away-from-home hacking sessions go much more smoothly.

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Note: This is a preliminary version of this document. I’ve not fully verified that the stuff in here works.

Debian provides a powerful utility called make-kpkg for compiling your own custom kernels. It integrates tightly with dpkg by making .deb files and you can even use this to prepare your kernel image on a faster system. Later on it will make complex operations, such as compiling in patches and modules, a snap.

To get the DVD-ROM drive working, you’ll need to compile your kernel with the following options:

Note: Caoilte wrote this. I’ve not had a chance to check it yet.

First, you’ll need to recompile your kernel, with the following options:

A page that I found recommends installing the spicctrl and sjog packages to get control over the LCD brightness and JogDial.

You’ll need to install the ACPI patches, and the ACPI daemon. Grab the patches from here, and apply them to the kernel:

According to this page, the Debian xserver-xfree86 package includes support for the Intel i815 chipset in the SRX87, so grab that using dselect or similar.

In dselect, install kernel-image-2.4.18-686. This will drag in all of the other required packages for a 2.4 kernel. It’ll suggest kernel-pcmcia-modules-2.4.18-686 as well. You might as well select this as well.