Linux on a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook E2010

Here's a short and small collection of tweaks & tips to get Linux installed on a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook E2010. If you're looking for Linux on other mobile devices, I'd recommend you start your search at TuxMobil, they offer a vast ressource of links to lots of HOWTOs and FAQs about the topic.

I started off with RedHat 9 and later did a fresh install of Fedora Core 2. I guess there might also be a tip or two for your favourite other distro in here. If you got anything working beyond what I describe here, I'd love to hear from you...

Display
TV-Out
CD-RW
ACPI
IrDA
Modem
Updates

Display

Xorg (as of Fedora Core 2) already ships with the ATI driver supporting 2D acceleration for the IGP chipset used in the laptop. XFree86 (as of RedHat 9) did not support it yet, but there's enough info on the internet on how to get the right ATI driver.
Since Fedora Core 3, the radeon driver of Xorg supports 3D acceleration. glxgears at least gives me about 300fps with little processor load. I guess that's all such an integrated card can do...

TV-Out

Eg watching movies on the TV-Output is possible. First, make sure your kernel loads a framebuffer device (you'll need a kernel boot-parm like vga=0x311). Boot with the S-Video cable connected to the TV, switch to the console, turn-on TV-Output (e.g. with atitvout -f t) and have mplayer output to the fb device (e.g. mplayer -vo fbdev -zoom -x 640 -y 480).

CD-RW

For RedHat 9 (kernel 2.4), the CD-RW drive (A Toshiba SD-R2412) has the nasty behaviour of responding on LUNs 0-7 if multi-LUN probing is enabled in the Kernel. This screws up the usage of the drive quite a bit. However, I do need multi-LUN probing to support devices such as my PQI 6-in-1 TravelFlash USB adapter. To disable multi-LUN probing for the CD-RW (hdc), add kernel bootparm hdclun=0. Usage is then straight-forward, except that you of course have to enable SCSI-emulation for the drive through kernel bootparm hdc=ide-scsi.
For FC 2 (kernel 2.6), multi-LUN detection is automatic and correct for the CD-ROM, no kernel parameter has to be specified.

ACPI

APM seems not supported by the BIOS, so you have to enable ACPI support in your kernel. Through ACPI, I have the battery/charging status reported to the GNOME Applet and the ACPI Daemon monitors the Power button to shut down the machine if pressed (this came default since FC2 but needed manual set-up in RH9). I have not yet bothered installing suspend to RAM/Disk yet, this will probably come later. Processor clock scaling works well with cpuspeed when the acpi-cpufreq driver is used. Hence, make sure you have the following contents in /etc/cpufreq.conf before starting the cpuspeed-service:

VMAJOR=1
VMINOR=1
DRIVER="acpi-cpufreq"
OPTS="-i 10 -a /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/*/state"

IrDA

I have not managed to get FIR running -- apparently the IR-Controller used in the E2010 is not supported in Linux (yet).
SIR is pretty straight-forward. Set the IR-Mode in the BIOS to SIR & install IrDA as described in the HOWTO.
Make sure PCMCIA Cards do not use the interrupt allocated for the IrDA port, otherwise you'll get a irattach: tcsetattr: Input/output error in /var/log/messages. To disable e.g. interrupt 3 for use by PCMCIA, add exclude irq 3 to /etc/pcmcia/config.opts.

Modem

My mileage with the Modem is not convincing yet. Linmodem is probably the direction to look into, but I have not gotten it up yet...

Updates

Here's the ChangeLog of this page:

$Log: fujitsu.shtml,v $
Revision 1.10 2006/02/03 13:10:19 hajo
Added link to TuxMobil.org

Revision 1.9 2005/03/12 13:34:25 hajo
- Some more clarification about cpuspeed-daemon
- Updated TOC

Revision 1.8 2005/03/12 13:27:34 hajo
Removed non-Fujitsu issues & moved them to the Forum instead

Revision 1.7 2004/08/05 18:38:02 hajo
Added USB Drive section

Revision 1.6 2004/08/05 18:10:54 hajo
Added WLAN section

Revision 1.5 2004/08/05 18:09:55 hajo
Added Fedora Core 2 details