Linux on Fujitsu Lifebook (February 2003)

Introduction

This is my new laptop (purchased in December 2002 directly from Fujitsu). My previous laptop was a Thinkpad that broke and the cost to fix was too much (IBM wanted $900). So instead going for another IBM I did little research and found that Fujistu had a better price and better deal than a similarly equipped Thinkpad.

My laptop is a Lifebook S-Series Model 6110. I got the following setup:

Pentium III Processor 1.20GHz/800MHz - this can be controlled via ACPI interface (see below)
Display 13.3" XGA TFT - I went for the smaller display, since I wanted a light machine.
256MB memory
40GB hard drive - default is 30Gig for I upgraded for another $40 bucks.
DVD/CD-RW combo drive - the burner seems little flaky, some of the CDs I burned did not work well in other computers/CD players.
Modular 3.5" floppy drive
Build-in Modem 56K V.90 modem
Built-in 10/100 Ethernet
Windows XP Home - can't avoid this one

I also have a Lucent Orinoco Silver Wi-Fi card and a Logitech USB/optical mouse.

Installing Red Hat 8.0

I picked Red Hat 8.0, because I'm used to Red Hat distribution, plus this distribution seemed to have the correct version of XFree86. The chipset on the Fujitsu was not supported out of the box in RH 7.3.

I used Partition Magic to repartition the drive. The laptop comes with a Windows backup partition in addition to the normal C partition. The partitions under Windows are NTFS, so I created a FAT32 partition that can be shared by Linux and Windows. Here is what my partitions look like:

  Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
  /dev/hda8              3122956   2839220    125096  96% /
  /dev/hda9             14784680   2652668  11380976  19% /home
  /dev/hda6              8040840   1016996   7023844  13% /mnt/win

Plus a 512M swap partition. The "/mnt/win" partition is the shared FAT32 partition.

The graphical install worked out of the box. My first time through I wasn't paying attention and choose wrong packages (no developer stuff i.e. gcc etc), so rather than trying to figure out what I missed I re-did the install.

I choose GRUB as my boot loader. GRUB is great, because it reads a configuration file during the boot process, so once installed you don't have to touch the boot block. To add new systems to boot, you just edit the config file.

What works

X-Windows - works right out of the box. No problems at all with 24-bit true color, 1024x768 resolution.
Sound - works right out of the box. See modules.conf below.
Built-in Ethernet - works right out of the box. When no cable is plugged in the device is not detected. If cable is plugged during boot everything comes up fine.
WiFi - Orinoco Silver card works right out of the box. However, to have it start automatically you have to add ESSID env variables to "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0" and "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1". You need to change both, as the wireless card will sometimes be on eth0 and at other times on eth1, depending on whether the built-in port is active.
USB Mouse - works right out of the box.
CD and Floppy - work fine. I think hot swapping works - but I'll have to retest.

The built-in modem is a WinModem of some kind and I haven't yet tried it - I don't use modems much.

I haven't yet tested the DVD under Linux and the CD-RW.

Here is my /etc/modules.conf:

  alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
  alias usb-controller usb-ohci
  alias usb-controller1 ehci-hcd
  alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio
  post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
  pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
  alias usb-controller2 usb-uhci
  alias ieee1394-controller ohci1394
  alias eth0 8139too

Problems

APM
- this laptop does not support APM. It uses the new standard ACPI. With patched kernel basic stuff works, but I haven't yet gotten to try suspend and resume (I don't use these that much). See section below for ACPI details.
Gnome-term
- the default Gnome-term has a terrible memory leak and if you run "top" in a gnome-term window, it will eat up all the swap space in 3 minutes. This is a known Gnome bug and I bet you there is a fix on Gnome Web Site. I don't care I use Xterm.
Gnome battery applet
- the battery applet does not work as supplied. To get it to work properly with ACPI you have grab latest code from Gnome.org. See instructions below.
AcrobatReader
- default Acroread crashes in RH 8.0. I found a fix on the site: RH 8.0 Tips and Tricks
Xemacs
- I had a problem with Xemacs I built. It crashed when I tried to start it. I googled the problem and found that adding "--pdump" to the configuration and a rebuild fix the problem.

ACPI

ACPI stands for Advance Configuration and Power Interface and it is the new way for BIOS to pass information about the hardware configuration to the O/S. With ACPI the O/S has a lot more control over the hardware (espacially things like CPU speed settings, fans etc). ACPI replaces the APM interface.

Out of the box RH 8.0 only supports APM. To get ACPI support you have to create a patched kernel.

Kernel (as of 2/3/2003)
First of all the required patch for the kernel can be found on Sourceforge. Take a look at the ACPI4Linux project. Or go directly to the Project page, where you can find the latest patches.
I used Kernel 2.4.20 from http://www.kernel.org and ACPI patch number: 20021212.
I followed the standard procedure to patch, configure and recompile the kernel (if you want to see my kernel ".config" file let me know). I had to unconfigure lots of the unneeded SCSI devices, otherwise I ran into compilation errors.
Once the new kernel was up and running I have these directories in my "/proc" file system:
```
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 ac_adapter
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 alarm
dr-xr-xr-x    4 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 battery
dr-xr-xr-x    4 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 button
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 debug_layer
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 debug_level
-r--------    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 dsdt
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 embedded_controller
-r--------    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 event
-r--------    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 fadt
dr-xr-xr-x    2 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 fan
-r--r--r--    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 info
dr-xr-xr-x    2 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 power_resource
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 processor
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 sleep
dr-xr-xr-x    2 root     root            0 Feb  3 22:42 thermal_zone
```
Battery and AC devices work properly. The processor device is fine - I can change the speed at which the processor runs.
However, the thermal and fan devices are not available. I don't understand why, although I've been studying the ACPI driver code. So, I cannot run a program to monitor and control the temperature of the CPU. I haven't played with sleep yet.
In any case the CPU fan seems to work OK and it comes on when the computer gets warm. But it seems to me that the fan runs more when under Windows, than under Linux. But maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Battery Monitor
The Gnome battery applet does not work with ACPI as distributed with RH 8.0. I fixed the code myself, but when I offered a patch to Gnome it turned out the problem was already fixed. So, to get the battery monitor working properly get the Gnome Applets 2.0.1 source, then replace the file "battstat/acpi_linux.c" with the version from Gnome's CVS. Then just rebuild and reinstall the battery applet.

Summary

So far I'm very happy with this notebook. It's been traveling with me to work every day - I often use it on the ferry. The battery life if pretty long - I think I could get 3 hours out of if if I wasn't using wireless network.

I still have to figure out and set up couple of things:

ACPI daemon to handle various power events, includin suspending (I see the events generated, but I haven't configured the daemon to do anything yet).
Test out the CD burner. The Windows package that comes with the computer is really lame.
Configure DVD player.
Try a more recent ACPI patch to see if I can get the fan and temperature under control of the O/S.

If you have any questions please email me. I'll be happy to answer, if I can.