Linux on Laptops

For Linux configurations on many specific laptops, see this page.

Linux on the Fujitsu-Siemens Liteline 654A

Introduction

I had the oportunity of configuring a nice Fujitsu-Siemens Liteline 654A laptop belonging to a friend. In brief, it was a Pentium III 600 MHz, with 128 MB ram, 10 GB hard disk, 14" LCD screen (1024x768), floppy and DVD inside, internal modem, Irda, USB, lithium battery and a Cardbus 10/100 lan PC Card.

The laptop was fairly new, and indeed with an adequate price; for no special reason, laptops with DVD use to have exagerate prices. It came with Windows 98 Second Edition badly pre-installed (for the rest, W98SE).

I was going to have it for only one day, to install on it a dual boot Linux/W98SE configuration with Lilo on the MBR, both spanish versions. With some caveats, and with configuration to be completed, the task was succesful.

It included the following CD's:

• From Fujitsu:
  • Customized version of W98SE.
  • Drivers (sound, video, modem, SpeedStep, etc).
  • DVD player (WinDVD).
• From Microsoft:
  • Word 2000.
  • Works 2000.

Hardware

The hardware has been briefly mentioned above. One thing that could be discussed is that hard disk and DVD were both on the primary IDE, as reported by its Phoenix bios. With patience and care this could be improved, opening the laptop and inserting an IDE cable as those used on laptops, if there were enough space.

Since W98SE came almost completeley installed (more on this later), on the Panel Control could be found the specific main componentes:

• Video: Silicon Motion Lynx3D, with a TFT LCD 14" 1024x768 screen.
• DVD: Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-C2402 8X
• USB: Intel 82371AB/EB
• IDE: Intel 82371 AB/EB
• Irda: 3.0, National Semiconductor (NSC) FIR (using a dma channel)
• ACPI configuration
• Lithium battery
• Sound:
  • ESS Maestro-3 Device Manager
  • ESS Maestro-3 DOS Emulation
  • ESS Maestro-3 PCI AudioDrive
  • ESS Modem Device Manager
  • Wave Device for Voice Modem
  • Modem: ESS ES56CVM-PI Data Fax Voice Modem
• Monitor: LCD 1024x768
• PCMCIA: Cardbus TI PCI-1225 controller

The lan PC Card was an Ovislink LFS-PCM32. Apparently, this was directly supported in Linux, as appears in PCMCIA Linux lists, but it seems that the manufacturer changed its chip from Intel to Realtek; anyhow, an Ovislink floppy contained code for supporting it.

Display can appear in LCD only, in external monitor only, or in both. This fact resulted very useful (more on this later).

Windows 98 Second Edition configuration

It came factory preinstalled, with such things as keyboard layout and time zone to be defined. Strangely (more on this later), it didn't ask for the W98SE key (that long one of 5 groups of 5 letters or numbers).

As known, manufacturer preinstallations are always poor and incomplete. Elements left out were:

• IrDA, disabled in bios.

• Printer port was not ECP (may be some day I find some use for it).

• No network protocols were installed.

It was easy to put remedy to all this.

Another strange thing was the W98SE key. As known, you can find it in W98SE Registry at HKLM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/ProductKey. What was there was completely different to the one on a label on the laptop, so it seems that Fujitsu had made a lot of disks equal before laptop assembly to save time; I wonder if Microsoft likes this.

However, in other aspect the configuration seemed to have been done by an incompetent idiot, since the partitioning came as follows:

• Primary (C:): 2 GB in FAT16 (yes, FAT16), with W98SE, being occupied some more than 900 MB.

• Extended with one drive (D: in FAT32): 6 GB, empty.

So 2 GB seemed to be wasted! I looked for something as an hibernation partition, with FDISK and in the manuals, without success. So I started deleting the extended partition, and changing primary from FAT16 to FAT32 with Microsoft's utility; the cluster size reduction from 32K to 4K alone made space occupied go down to something above 600 MB, a 300 MB reduction!

Looking for some free utility to increase the partition from 2 GB to something around 6 GB I found Partition Resizer, but for some reason (it complained about sector size not being 4K, certainly not the case) it didn't work (perhaps Partition Magic would work), so the fastest thing was to format and reinstall everything. Previously, I copied all files through the lan to a disk on a desktop (the more than 600 MB took around 10 minutes to be copied).

So I did with 'fdisk' a primary FAT32 partition of 5.9 MB, and an extended of 320 MB, placing there one unit to hold the W98SE swap file, formating it in FAT16. Installation of W98SE was done booting from the Fujitsu CD, which went smoothly although I customized it a little bit, resulting an ACPI installation. Then came the rest of elements (sound, video, modem and SpeedStep utility); most were easy and almost automatic with the drivers CD, although for video I had to do it manually. Final operations were:

• Swap on D:

• Install NETBEUI protocol

• Prepare Hyperterminal for easy modem testing

• Direct cable connection

• IrDA test with another laptop

• Lan PC Card

• Get a few configuration files from the desktop, that I had prepared for initial installation

Rather than copying previous installation, it seemed that the new one resulted the same as it, and even occupancy was also something above 600 MB.

Excuse me for this long explanation about the W98SE configuration; let me point out:

• The 300 MB occupancy reduction going from a 32K cluster to a 4K cluster. This could go worse as long as the disk would be used, since 1 byte files would physically occupy 32K bytes.
• The guy who had done the preinstallation was certainly affected by the crazy cow illness (in spanish "encefalopatía espongiforme bovina"; I'll look for the translation). A real danger. I continue asking myself for a good reason for this partitioning (more than the fact that FAT16 partitions are faster and suffer less from fragmentation).

So lets go back to Linux.

Linux

Chosen distribution was Suse 7.0 (spanish version). Except for video, installation was smooth booting from first CD. From above, there were two left partitions, so in the initial stages of installation, I did the partitioning as follows:

• Linux swap, around 384 MB.
• Linux ext2fs, around 3.3 MB.

I suppose that placing swap partition before ext2fs one decreases overall disk heads movement a little bit. Sizes and cilinder numbering resulted (see later):

• hda1 (FAT32): 5979 MB (1-727)
• hda2 (FAT16): 337 MB (728-768)
• hda3 (swap): 403 MB (769-817)
• hda4 (ext2fs): 3331 MB (818-1222)

It can be argued if lilo elements can go beyond cilinder 1024; lilo 21.6 or greater should take care of it ('loadlin' can be used for booting to install it).

Except X configuration, everything went fluently. I placed Lilo on the MBR, to choose operating system easily; even this was reflected on /etc/lilo.conf.

But X was a nightmare. The Silicon Motion Lynx3D chip was new to me. I looked for references about X with this chip, without succes. I couldn't get a working '/etc/XF86Config' with any of the known utilities. Finally, I executed 'sax -s XF86_VGA16' (that is Suse 'sax' graphic utility, but using the simplest server). With this, I could test and prepare a working '/etc/XF86Config', based on:

• XF86_SVGA server
• LCD monitor
• 1024x768 in 8, 16 and 24 bit colors.

Incidentally, the Suse box mentions Silicon Motion Lynx chips as supported; within 'sax' you can find one, and it says 'Supported from XInside'. I couldn't find information about this.

But still it didn't work. X started, but lasted a few seconds, and the screen turned black. I then attached an external monitor and observed that X appeared there! So I reached the following workaround:

• Start X manually. It can be done with something as 'startx -bpp 24', 'kdm', etc.
• Wait for screen to go black. If starting with 'kdm', it goes black after introducing user/password.
• Press Fn+F1 (labelled as "LCD off").
• Press Fn+F12 (labelled as "LCD/CRT").

Miracle! X is there!

So the rest of the installation was some tweaking, such as:

• It is known that Bill Gates thinks that his operating systems are the only ones which can exist in the world. So it uses to happen that with any W98SE reinstallation the MBR would be re-written, and Lilo would be lost. A simple solution is to install 'loadlin' within W98SE partition. So I created "C:\LOADLIN", put necessary files there, put a kernel there, and modified "C:\CONFIG.SYS" as follows:
  ...
  DEVICE=C:\ESSAUDIO.SYS
  ...
  [MENU]
  menuitem=LINUX, Linux with Loadlin
  menuitem=W98, Windows 98
  menudefault=W98,5
  menucolor=15,1
  
  [LINUX]
  rem shell=c:\loadlin\loadlin.exe @c:\loadlin\params
  shell=c:\loadlin\loadlin.exe @c:\loadlin\params
  
  [W98]
  ...
  The reasons for all this was:
  • ESSAUDIO.SYS refers to the sound chip. I was going to leave sound installation pending, so being there it would permit testing DOS initialization before Linux.
  • Lines following[MENU]permit choosing W98SE (default), or Linux with 'loadlin'.
  • Lines following[LINUX]are for 'loadlin'. Again appears here Bill Gates thinking that his operating systems are the only ones which can exist in the world, so a W98SE reinstallation would erase line "shell=...". But it would respect the previous "rem shell=..." line, so without needing to remember what was there before, all which has to be done is an easy copy&paste.
  • If the Lilo MBR disappears, to recover it the following steps must be done:
    • Through "C:\CONFIG.SYS" menu, enter Linux through 'loadlin'.
    • In '/etc' execute 'lilo'. This reads '/etc/lilo.conf' and restores Lilo MBR.
• Install some more packages from Suse CD's, specially the kernel sources. This finished in partition occupancy around 73%, a little big, so perhaps some packages should be uninstalled, or at the beginning W98SE partition should have been made smaller.

To do

As said, I was going to give back the laptop, so could not proceed further with the installation. So what remained pending was:

• X: perhaps another server could be tried, perhaps X release 4, perhaps making the mentioned workaround unnecessary...
• Customize the kernel (IrDA, sound, etc).
• PC Card, using code on its floppy for its Realtek chip.
• Sound (perhaps supported on the kernel).
• Internal modem and Internet.
• IrDA (NSC chip).
• USB (Suse distribution includes support for it in kernel).
• DVD.

Eventually, results of above can appear on this page. Anyhow, I hope someone can find all above useful, or improve it, if getting what I think is a very nice laptop.

Webillo Disperso, webillo@automodelismo.com
Madrid, Spain

January 2001.

BTW, visit AutoWebadas, all about radio controlled car racing in Spain.

Last update 06/12/12