DISCLAIMER: this document has nothing to do with NEC, they don't even know it exists. There is no guarantee that the information on this page is accurate, please don't hold me responsible if your experience is different from the information here.
There may be a problem with the status of the PCMCIA subsystem during installation in later Versas. Jin Choi has a nice page about a hack workaround.
About the NEC Versa
The NEC Versa series seems to be a pretty good laptop. It has several
features over standard laptops that made me choose the machine:
This page is taken mostly from the experience of Versa M and Versa P owners. I'm told that most of the information also applies to Versa E and Versa V. I expect less information applies to the Versa S: that machine is noticeably different from the other Versas. And NEC has recently introduced new machines: the Versa 2000 and Versa 4000. Rumour has it they're souped up Versa M and Versa P, but I have no experiene with them.
Benchmarks are silly, but still vaguely interesting. There's a web page of SPECmark ratings that makes a Pentium 90 machine look roughly comparable to a SparcStation 20/61 for integer work, about 3/4 the speed on floating point. The P/75 is of course slower than the P/90. As for X, xbench reports 23k xstones on my P/75 running locally. (For comparison, I've seen values anywhere between 7k and 300k xstones, depending mostly on the acceleration support.)
Linux Installation
Any modern distribution of Linux should install fine on the Versas. I
have personally installed Slackware 2.1.0 (an old version) and RedHat
2.0 with no serious problems. Stephen Uhler reports that he needs to
use the "linear" option to LILO to make it work (this is common on
machines with big IDE drives.) Paul Metzger had some trouble with
block mapping - I don't think this has to be done with newer kernels,
but he suggests:
At bootdisk prompt, enter 'ramdisk hd=523,32,63'. In lilo.conf, insert 'append="hd=523,32,63"' and a second line stating 'linear'.This is presumably specific to a 540 meg hard drive.
X Windows
The bulk of this information has been moved to a separate document. Make sure your kernel
has PS/2 mouse support to use the NEC Versa trackball.
Sound
The Versa P comes with a SoundBlaster Pro compatible card: the DOS
games Doom and Descent work great with it. (Descent detects an ESS
488/688 AudioDrive for sound effects and an SB Pro / 16 for music.)
The Versa M appears to have a "Microsoft Sound System" card that is
not SoundBlaster compatible: Doom and Descent don't get full sound
(although Windows apps do).
Thanks to advice from <yoonho@sina.tcamc.uh.edu>, I have been able to get /dev/audio to work on the Versa P, both for playing and recording. On a Versa P, when you configure sound, don't put in all sound drivers: just configure an SBPro at base 0x220, IRQ 5, DMA 1.
Stephen Uhler reports that on his Versa M he can play audio files to /dev/audio with no problem. Reading from /dev/audio (and the builtin mike) doesn't seem to work. His sound configuration is: MS sound system at 0x530 irq 9 dma 3.
Power Management
The Versa offers three automatic power management features: turning off
the hard drive, the LCD display, and putting the entire system into
suspend mode. Versa lets you turn each power management feature
off and on indivdually.
Power management for the hard drive and LCD don't interfere with linux at all. The screen turns itself off and on like you'd expect, the hard drive spins down as often as Linux will allow it to. The hard drive spins back up when it is needed.
Suspend has some problems: I have found that taking the machine out of suspend mode doesn't always resume linux correctly. It appears that if you try to resume from suspend to an X windows console (at least, in 800x600 mode), the machine doesn't restore properly and completely crashes. Resuming from suspend to a text console (even when X is running in another console) does appear to work.
I get about four hours of battery life with two batteries installed. That's four hours of constantly using the machine with a bright screen - compiling, doing find across /, playing Descent, etc.
Stephen Uhler says on his Versa M:
Although I haven't tried any pcmcia cards yet, pcmcia-probe reports: Intel PCIC probe: Cirrus CL-PD672x rev 3 found, 2 sockets. Mine arrived with the pcmcia disabled in cmos. I had to turn on pcmcia in order for the above to work.I'm told that newer PCMCIA drivers can turn the PCMCIA on automatically.
And Ted Herman <Ted.Herman@turing.cs.uiowa.edu> says:
I'm running 1.2.8 + modules-1.2.8 + pcmcia-cs-2.6.3 with a New Media Bus Toaster (that's my SCSI II adaptor) and New Media Ethernet LAN. I've successfully used this setup to access an NEC 3xe CDROM, a SCSI Joule hard disk, and the Internet.
Finally, Paul Metzger suggests:
In /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia, set 'PCIC=i82365' and OPTS="wakeup=1"'. Verify that the call to '/sbin/insmod $PC/$PCIC.o $OPTS' is correct and not commented out. Add the following line to /etc/pcmcia/config: exclude irq 9, ports 0x2e0-0x2efAnd Ted Herman adds that the last range should be ports 0x2e0-0x2ff.
Docking Stations
The port replicator works just fine - no suprise there. It allows you
to plug in both a keyboard and a mouse, but it blocks the headphone
port! Argh! As near as I can tell, it's impossible to simultaneously
plug in headphones, a keyboard, and a mouse into a NEC Versa P. If you
have a solution, let me know.
I have no experience with the big NEC docking stations. Muhammad Saggaf sent me a message describing a kernel workaround for a problem probing the IDE controller in the docking station. It looks to be a linux bug.
This page has benefited from the experiences of:
| Nelson Minar | Created: November, 1994? |
| <nelson@media.mit.edu> | Updated: October 9, 1998 |