TuxMobil: Linux on the Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook E-7110 Laptop

Specs

Mobile Pentium 4-M 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD, DVD/CD-RW-Combo, 15" TFT SXGA+, 2xUSB, Modem, 10/100 LAN, ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, i810 Sound.

Installation

This system was equipped with Novell/SuSE Linux 7.2, not the freshes distribution available. But there had to be Oracle 9i installed which is specified for 7.1/2. The installation itself was rather painless, due to the optical drive being an internal IDE-drive.

BIOS

You may reach the Phoenix BIOS with F2. A nice feature is to call a little boot menu (F12), where you can choose the boot device.

CD-R

Burning CD-Rs works as usual, designate hdc to ide-scsi by appending "hdc=ide-scsi" to the kernel start and loading the module ide-scsi. Burning CD-RW and playing DVD was not tested.

APM/ACPI

ACPI support is more or less useless with SuSE 7.2.
APM does little better, since APM is slowly dropped in favor of ACPI. The screen is blanked after a couple of minutes of inactivity and the machine shuts down properly.

PCMCIA

You need the driver for i82365 for the controller. But the SuSE scripts figure out that one automatically. With 7.2, you have to grab some newer pcmcia-cs package, for instance the package for 8.1 (remember to --force and --nodeps).

Ethernet

Piece of cake, take the driver for rtl8139 (which was not auto-detected).

Sound (ALSA)

The chip can be used with snd-card-intel8x0, but you have to get an updated rpm: check this location . Afterwards you should not use Yast2 for configuration but alsaconf.

Console

Framebuffer support for VESA works, 1280x1024@24.

XFree86

You have to update to XFree86 4.2.0, which you can get for 7.2 from here , unless you want to work with 640x480@4. Afterwards you can run in SXGA+ with 24bpp.
But the radeon driver has some problems with agpgart, do not load that module with SuSE 7.2 or XFree86 will not start.

Modem

It is likely, that the pctel driver will work. Unfortunately, I had to stick to the kernel shipped by SuSE. The kernel-package for that kernel did not include the same configuration as was compiled into the running kernel, so it ended up with unknown symbols when loading the compiled driver for pctel.

Other Resources

Credits

Sebastian Henschel
Christian Worm <cworm_at_gmx.net>

Add Ons

This information was provided by Christian Worm:

ACPI

Some ACPI features of the E7010 are supported with kernel 2.4.20 + acpi patch. The system shuts down properly and the events of the powerbutton and the lidswitch can be queried by acpid. At the moment I use the lidswitch to trigger swsusp. The battery applet of KLaptop ist working too. SpeedStep works via ACPI and the autospeedstep daemon .

Software Suspend

I patched swsusp-beta19 into my kernel. Suspend/resume mostly works, the system sometime hangs on resume. With the patches even suspending with a running OpenGL application works. If you use Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ALSA drivers take care that there is no program like kmixer or sound in general is running if you suspend because after resume ALSA won't work. Restarting ALSA fixes this. However I suggest using the kernel driver (see below).

Sound

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ALSA works with the snd-intel8x0 module but has some problems with the modem and swsusp. The kernel driver (CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=3Dy) doesn't have any problems with swsusp and the modem.

Modem

The modem works with this modules . The installation is well documented in the suplied README. The module complains that the installed Modem Codec isn't compatible but works anyways. Also this message seems to disapear, if the module is inserted with the device ID of the modem. Just do a modinfo slamrmo to see the parameter Options. If you use ALSA Sound drivers the sound becomes "scratchy" if there is traffic on the modem line.

The modem does definetly not work with the pctel drivers!

DVD-CD/RW

Works. Usual setup with ide-scsi for burning, DVD Playback with mplayer, xine oder ogle.

Firewire

Firewire works with the ieee1394 module, setup is described on the FireWire project . Tested with a Toshiba DVD-Burner and some Firwire harddisks.

BIOS

The German documentation of the Lifebook did not mention that it is possible to deactivate the touchpad by pressing FN+F4 if this is set in the BIOS.

NIC

Works with the 8139too module, causes scratchy DVD sound if the ALSA drivers are used for sound. No problems with the kernel sound driver.