Fedora 8 on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo-D

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

Last update: 14.05.2008

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.

To arrange this page more clearly I removed all references and descriptions about older distributions. If you are interested in information about RedHat 7.x or Fedora Core 1-6, you will find them on a separate page about old distributions.

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 wink. 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 (12.68×10.91×1.50 inches) on the front side and 322×277×44 mm (12.68×10.91×1.73 inches) on the rear side. The weight is 3.27 kg (7.21 pounds).

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, 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

Currently I'm using Fedora 8 with 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 went without problems but I've noticed that ACPI is deactivated by default. To activate it you have to use the kernel option acpi=force. The graphical boot manager usually messes things up, so delete the option rhgb.

Graphics

If you encounter problems with your X-Server you should reconfigure it. Herefor enter on the command line system-config-display --reconfigure. The reconfigure option advises this tool to create a completely new config file. Afterwards you still can change it manually. Here you will find my config file xorg.conf.

Sound

ALSA works just fine on the VIA chipset.

Ethernet

The tulip module was loaded atomatically.

WLAN

This notebook does not have an internal WLAN device! Here some general information.

Since Fedora 7 there are the system services NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher. Both should be activated and started on boot. KDE has a tool called KNetworkManager which provides very easy interface for WLAN searching and configuring. This is the most comfortable method.

If you cannot or do not want to use it, you can use a tool I have written: wlanscanner to join preferred wireless networks.

Modem

First of all: much information about WinModems with Linux can be found on the LinModem page.

Dedicated packages for this modem can be found in http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/packages/ltmodem/kernel-2.6/. This link is merely a directory with some files, don't expect too much. Packages for kernel above 2.6.12 are in the martian subdirectory.

The driver consists of a kernel module and an user space daemon. In a quick try I succeeded in compiling the driver and loading the module but I could not communicate to the modem with minicom. If I succeed in the future, I will let you know.

OneTouch buttons

(additional butons on the front edge)

After startup those keys are not active and not usable. To activate them you can use the small perl tool omke.pl available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/omke/.

Once activated, these keys have to be made usable, because until now the send only some scancodes which are unknown to the kernel. Assuming you have copied omke.pl to /usr/local/sbin you can insert the following lines into /etc/rc.d/rc.local to activate the keys and set their keycodes.

# Activate OneTouchButtons
/usr/local/sbin/omke.pl -k 1
setkeycodes e071 148 # User1 KEY_PROG1      X:159
setkeycodes e072 149 # User2 KEY_PROG2      X:151
setkeycodes e073 150 # Web   KEY_WWW        X:178
setkeycodes e074 155 # Mail  KEY_MAIL       X:236
setkeycodes e075 115 # Vol+  KEY_VOLUMEUP   X:176
setkeycodes e076 114 # Vol-  KEY_VOLUMEDOWN X:174

The keycodes can be obtained from the kernel sourcecode, the are in the file include/linux/input.h.

Since the system now knows about our extra keys we can finally use them in X. The tool lineak (Linux Easy Access Keyboard, http://lineak.sourceforge.net/) can intercept the keycodes and launch some actions. This program is also a part of the Fedora distribution and can easily be installed with yum, together with some plugins.

In theory lineak can also set the scancodes for the keyboard, but it needs super-user rights for it. Hence it is more simple to set them globally. Every user can still set individual actions for them. Activating OneTouchButtons with lineak is not possible, as far I as I know.

Here is my config file lineakkb.def which applies some actions to the codes. If you install the xosd plugin the actions will be showed on your screen.

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)

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.

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

Fedora has grown in size, but my hard drive did not. This laptop is too old for an upgrade. But KDE does not fit any more, so I switched to XFCE. It rrrrreally nice.

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.

The extended console modes (e.g. kernel option vga=0x305) are incompatible with the X server. After switching from the graphical to the text console, the latter one shows only some colourfull lines.

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