Fedora Core 1-4 on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo-D

TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones Linux auf Laptops

Last update: 18.05.2006

I do not work for Fujitsu-Siemens and I'm not a technician. Many people asked me where they can get replacement parts for their notebook. The should have asked Fujitsu-Siemens, because I don't know. Some other people had questions about different notebook models. Well, they also should have asked the manufacturer, because I can't know every notebook produced by them.

Contact

If one has any further questions about my machine or my configuration, I will try to answer them. I cannot guarantee, that my answers will solve any of your problems ;-). My email adress is adalbert.prokop@gmx.de.

If you are searching for information about other notebook models you should have a look on http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ or http://tuxmobil.org/mylaptops.html.

Please note that I'm not a native speaker. If my english sounds wooden or funny - amuse youself as much as you like and send me a note how to fix it later on. ;-)

Overview

[Front view with opened lid] The measures taken from the user's manual are 322×277×38 mm on the front side and 322×277×44 mm on the back side. The weight is 3.27 kg.

The notebook has a blue, shiny color, 14.1" display, touchpad with two buttons, stereo speakers of average quality, extra buttons on the front edge (only for Windows), volume buttons, microphone and earset connectors. It has one PS/2 port, internal WinModem, ethernet, one FireWire (IEEE 1394) port, 2 USB ports, parallel port, SVGA- and TV-out (S-Video).

[Info display]

Above the keyboard there is a LC display, which informs about the state of keyboard (any lock buttons), hard drive and CD-ROM activity, floppy, PCMCIA cards, battery, recharging and DC adapter state.


[Rear view] [Right side]


Hardware

Typ AMILO-D Series
Reg No: N-30N3
Modell: CY 23
CPU Intel Pentium III, 1,2GHz (desktop), 2378,95 bogo mips
BIOS Phoenix V.4.0 Release 06
Chipset VIA PN133T (VT8606) North Bridge, VT686B South Bridge
Cache 256 KB second level cache
Memory 256 MB shared, with 128 MB on Board
Display 14.1" TFT-XGA, 1024×768 / 32 bbp / 60 Hz
1024×768 / 32 bbp / 85 Hz (external) or
1280×1024 / 32 bbp / 60 Hz (external)
Graphics S3 Savage4 graphic controller (integrated in VIA chipset), with 8/16/32 MB shared memory.
Audio CS4299 AC97, volume is adjustable by front edge buttons.
Media 20 GB hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM/DVD combo
Interfaces
  • 1× parallel
  • 1× PS/2
  • 2× USB
  • 2× PC-Card (PCMCIA) type I/II or 1× type III (32 bit)
  • 1× modem (Lucent WinModem)
  • 1× ethernet LAN 10/100 Mbit (Accton [tulip])
  • 1× CRT
  • 1× S-Video (TV)
  • 1× IEEE 1394 (FireWire)
  • 1× earset, 1× microphone
  • no serial interfaces
  • no IR interfaces

Ian Forgaty <ian DOT foggo AT btinternet DOT com> reported that the Acer Aspire 1203VX Laptop is exact the same model as mine. You can find documentation about the Acer model on Acer's homepage. Dana Olson reported that the Trillium N-30N3 notebook (ACY23-15 on the label on the bottom) is also very similar, but the CPU, which is a Celeron.

BIOS

The BIOS does not offer any useful settings. Hard drive is detected automatically, it is not possible to change the type.

An interresting setting is Installed OS:

Win98/Me/2K/XP

or

Only Win NT4.0

I have no idea what it does, so I left it with the default value Win98/Me/2K/XP.

Linux installation

Distribution

Kernel 2.6

Currently I'm using Fedora Core 6, but I plan to update to Fedora 7 as soon as possible. I use the precompiled kernel shipped with Fedora. Since it has everything I need, I do care about compiling my own kernel. The NTFS driver ntfs-3g (a part of fuse) works good enough, so there is no need for the kernel driver.

The installation worked without problems.

Kernel 2.4

I used Fedora Core 1, and before that RedHat Linux since version 7.1. The precompiled kernel (2.4.22-1.2188.nptl) ran without problems, since version 2.4.9X. There were no problems during the installation, but RedHat 8.0 and 9 made an exception. The installations process stucked in, because of failed PCMCIA initialisation. I had to insert the PCMCIA driver disc to continue.

Some people reported problems during the installation - the installation process seemed to freeze. This could happen because of the IRQ routing bug described below. The installation kernel boot option nopcmcia helped here.

boot: linux nopcmcia <other_options>

Since Fedora Core 1 uses an ACPI backport from the 2.5.X kernel, the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is used in the installation procedure instead of the older Advanced Power Management (APM). Booting is no longer a problem. See also the PCMCIA section.

Graphics

The graphic chip was not detected under RedHat and Fedora Core 1. I've chosen the S3 Savage4 manually. Fedora Core 2 and 3 detected it at once.

With XFree86-4.1.0-3 (before RedHat 7.3) there were some display problems with StarOffice, for example (some elements of the StarOffice desktop became transparent). I switched off the acceleration function in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, section Device, option no_accel. Of course X became a little bit slower. Since the update to XFree86-4.1.0-15 this problem was solved. There's no need to switch off the acceleration any more.

Sound

Generaly, it works. There were no problem with a running arts server. Without the server and running RedHat one had to switch the master volume (sometimes the WAV channel) to mute and back, to get the sound working.

RealPlayer 8.0 could not produce any usable sounds under RedHat 7.2 (kernel 2.4.9-x), only WAV garbage. It sound like piping the kernel to /dev/dsp. Since RedHat 7.3 (kernel 2.4.18-x) this problem did not reappear.

RealPlayer 8 didn't work with Fedora Core. I still do not know why. Even invoking with the command

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19 realplay

had no effect, so the Native POSIX Thread Library (NTPL) cannot be blamed for it.

Ethernet

The tulip module was loaded atomatically.

WLAN

Fedora Core 5/6

With Fedora 5/6 you cannot use the cardctl scheme to choose a wireless configuration because cardctl has been renamed to pccardctl and the scheme option has been removed. I had the choice to do some tricks to enforce the old system or make something new. I always wanted automatic wireless configuration, so I wrote a script wlanscanner which scans for available wireless networks and eventually joins them. You can read about it in my blog, article #27.

Fedora Core 2-4

In my opinion Fedora Core 2/3/4 has very limited support for roaming between different wireless networks. For example creating and using different configurations via the cardctl scheme mechanism does not work without further changes. Those who still want to use it (like me...) can achieve it as follows:

  1. Copy two bash fuctions from FC1. You can use my file shared and copy it to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.
  2. The script /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless has to be edited. Insert the following three lines just after the initial comments (please note the full stop at the beginning of the first line!) 
    . /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/shared
get_info $DEVICE
ADDRESS="$SCHEME,$SOCKET,$INSTANCE,$HWADDR"
  3. In the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 (or however your WLAN card is labeled) you have to append this lines 
    HWADDR="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX"
TYPE=Wireless
    You have to replace all X'es by your card's MAC address. Please make sure lines are unique. Latter variable assignmens will overwrite previous ones.

KDE now has a application called KWiFi, which manages wireless network profiles. Unfortunately it didn't work for me.

Modem

It works! Thanks to Christoph Hebeisen, Aleksey Kondratenko and all others for their great work! Many information about WinModems with Linux can be found on the LinModem page.

Kernel 2.6

The package, which could be compiled with kernel 2.4 is not compatible with kernel 2.6. Fortunately there are kernel 2.6 drivers available. Because in the new driver's package there are no routines to create RPM packages, I won't offer any drivers for Fedora. The compilation is rather easy to manage and decribed shortly by a included README file. Since Fedora Core 2 the driver can be compiled even without installed kernel sources, because the kernel header files are included in the kernel package.

The package is ltmodem-2.6-8alk.tar.bz2 and can be downloaded from the http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/packages/ltmodem/kernel-2.6 site. In case of some transfer trouble you can also get that package from this site: ltmodem-2.6-8alk.tar.bz2 (430 kB)

Kernel 2.4

The precompiled module for kernel version 2.4.9-13 worked very well. The module, which I compiled on my own for the newer kernel did as well ... One can download the RPM-Packages and the sources from http://www.heby.de/ltmodem/.

In Fedora Core 1 a parameter in the kernel code has been changed, so the compilation of the modem driver failed. This problem was already discussed in the linmodem forum.

Security concerned admins will want to apply the patch to the driver sources themselves. For everyone else I can provide a patched source code version and a RPM package for Fedora Core 1. I won't compile the modem driver for any future kernel releases of FC1 because I'm not using it any more. You've got the sources, DIY! ;)

OneTouch buttons

(additional butons on the front edge)

These buttons can also be used with Linux and can be given arbitrary user defined functions. To get advantage of those buttons one needs for example Péter Soós' omnibook driver, which offers the activations of OneTouch button along with other interesting and usefull information. This driver supports Amilo D laptops since version 2004-01-16. It can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/omke/.

For those, who are not familiar with kernel compilations, the small tool omke.pl should be enough, because it also can activate the OneTouch buttons. In this case one has to renounce additional information in /proc system.

Once those buttons are activated, one has to make them work with X, which cannot understand the created scancodes nativly. I use a tool named lineak (Linux Easy Access Keyboard, http://lineak.sourceforge.net/) with FC4/5/6. And here is my configuration file describing my keycodes.
Those, who additionally use xosd (http://www.ignavus.net/software.html), will get a nice on-screen-display of currently called functions, as volume height for example. Precompiled packages of xosd exist at http://freshrpms.net/.

With FC 1/2/3 I used a tool named hotkeys written by Anthony Wong. (http://ypwong.org/hotkeys/). It is not supported any more and the compilation under FC4 was highly difficult. Here is my config file for those extra buttons.

With FC 1 it worked out of the box. With FC 2 it doesn't beacause the keyboard handling has been changed. One has to specify the scancodes for those unknown keys. This can be achieved by appending the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall.

setkeycodes e071 236
setkeycodes e072 237
setkeycodes e073 238
setkeycodes e074 239
setkeycodes e075 138
setkeycodes e076 179

For further information see an article in the Linux Gazette.

FireWire

I've tried to get a digital video recorder working, but it was a complete failure, even with kernel 2.4.18. I don't know where the problem lies, in wrong drivers, setting or generous incompability of my chipset. It works with Windows ... Since RedHat 7.3 I did not make any further attempts. If anyone did it, I would like to know.

USB

Works... wink But remember, it's only USB 1.1, so be patient.

PCMCIA (PC-Card)

Fedora Core 4/5/6

Suprisingly, my WLAN card is not detected automatically when I insert it. Both PCMCIA slots seems to be empty. I have to call pccardctl insert (or cardctl insert on FC4, respectively) first. Then it is detected and its module is loaded. But if the card is already present at boot time, the card is detected and configured automatically. It is a little mistery I still did not understood.

before Fedora Core 1

With RedHat 8.0 and 9 the system hanged up while loading the PCMCIA drivers. Tim Güthling found out that there is a routing conflict between PCMCIA and USB.

RedHat 8.0 and 9 did not boot from the installation CD/floppy. I had to insert the floppy with the PCMCIA drivers (pcmciadd.img) when asked for additional drivers. Afterwards the installation procedure went on.

With a borrowed PCMCIA card (10Mbit Ethernet D-Link DE-660+) I found out that starting the PCMCIA services (/etc/init.d/pcmcia start) does not freeze the machine, if the PCMCIA bus driver is loaded before the USB driver. The following entry in the file /etc/modules.conf should manage it:

pre-install usb-uhci modprobe yenta_socket

To preserve the order of the network interfaces (1st internal network interface, 2nd PCMCIA interface) I also added following two aliases in /etc/modules.conf:

alias eth0 tulip
alias eth1 pcnet_cs

Attention! pcnet_cs is the driver for my PCMCIA card... ;-P Replace it with the appropriate driver for yours.

Important: There was still a problem. When rebooting, the machine froze when loading the USB drivers. I still did not find out, why and how to fix it. Trying out several kernel reboot options did not work. None of reboot=warm, reboot=cold, reboot=hard or reboot=bios changed this behaviour.

In Fedora Core 1 this problem does not appear, because the IRQ routing is managed by ACPI. The power button initialises a system shutdown as default. The display button can also be programmed. One can get the battery and CPU status, though the results seem to be kind of weird (incorrect?)...

External CRT

Works. ;-) The Fn+F5 key shortcut switches aroud the following modes:

S-Video

One can switch between the TFT and S-Video with the keys Fn+F5. The screen resolution shoud be adjusted to 800×600 pixel for a "normal" TV output.

The S-Video adaptor is not compatible with the common composite cinch adaptor! S-Video transfers luminosity (brightness) and chrominance (color intensity) seperately. A composite signal is composed of both pieces of information. Most adaptors from S-Video to cinch use the luminosity and leave chroma unused. The result is an black'n'white image. Unfortunately, one can't simply connect luminosity and chrominance, that would result in a short-circuit.

If you don't want to spend money for a prefabricated S-Video to composite adapter, ask Google for the cable FAQ. There you can find a manual for a self made adapter.

Specials

The internal fan is very loud. Like a hair dryer. Once my girlfriend heard it over the phone and asked if I was vacuum cleaning...

The nobook's keyboard is rather loose and bends down a little when pressing keys in the middle. It lets the keyboard rattle silently while typing.

When playing videos, there was a suspicius players' behaviour till XFree86-4.1.0-25 (kernel 2.4.9-x). If I used the graphical login (kdm), the player showed a window (which was good) with green stripes in it (which was bad). When using mplayer (V.0.6) the options mplayer -vo sdl -noxv helped (no stripes, the video was running), but the fullscreen mode was not working correctly. If I switched into the fullscreen mode and back, the window showed only a part of the fullscreen area.

When I used the simple console login and started X manually, every video player worked as it should.

I still don't know a solution of these problems or which components were to blame for them.

Since XFree86-4.2.0-8, mplayer V.0.9a and kernel 2.4.18-x these bugs no longer exist. You can even watch DivX5 movies without jitters.

Fedora Core 2/3 does not use the XFree86 X-Server any more for licensing reasons. Instead they have the GNU project Xorg. Unfortunately KDE tries to load keyboard layouts from the XFree86 project, which do not exist. You can fix this problem by creating this links in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules

ln -s xorg xfree86
ln -s xorg.lst xfree86.lst
ln -s xorg.xml xfree86.xml

Last changes on: Sunday, 5. October 2008, 22:48:51