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by Rolf Johansson | 2002-07-14 I recently got a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo D notebook, and installed Debian Linux on it after doing some re-partitioning on the hard drive. Debian runs fine and most of the hardware are easily accessed.
As I'm not very used to installing Linux at all, I had my way of doing it (by installing the base system and all softare from the net), but the central problem this time was the network card, an Accton combo card that could not be recogniced so easily. I downloaded and burned the first (of three) Debian 2.2rev6 ISO file, and installed the base system from there. After that, it became clear to me (after googling the net) that the "tulip" driver could be the right for the Accton card, but the driver in the kernel that was installed by 2.2rev6 (that is a 2.2.x kernel) didn't work properly with my card. Therefore, I downloaded the source for the 2.4.18 kernel and compiled it with the tulip driver. When booting that newly compiled kernel, the Accton card was suddenly recognised by the tulip driver. Success, and I could continue installing the relevant Debian packages with apt-get and net sources (I completely skipped the guided package install system). As I have ADSL there was no need for me to get the built-in modem to work, but it is said on the net that this Lucent modem works ok with some work put into it. The graphics card is a S3 Savage 4 with upto 32 MB memory that is shared with the main RAM memory. This is a "twister" card and has currently no accel support in XFree-4, I've tried some driver (see below) but the problems I experience doesn't get solved. Problems seem to be the XVideo extension, for example I get green dots on some colours when running mplayer with the xv display mode. I also had some problems with the screen locking when switching from/to console from X, but this seemed to be eliminated when I properly compiled in simple vga16 framebuffer support in the kernel. The audio chip, intergrated in the VIA chipset as VIA 82C686A, has module support in the 2.4.x kernels and it worked great (from what you could expect from intergrated audio chips like this - the sound is totally crap if you've got some sort of ears to listen with) at once after compiling in it. PCMCIA isn't tested at all - I have no cards and have not played with it. The combo DVD/CD-RW drive was recogniced (Toshiba). I've been burning some cdr(w) discs, and it workes fine with the ide-scsi module and cdrdao (8x for cdr). Playing DVD:s works great too (with mplayer). Amilo D seems to have no APM support, just ACPI interfaces. ACPI is more developed and carries support for hardware control (suspend, power off) and sensor reading (thermal, batteries), but ACPI is not greatly developed for Linux. I've tried different drivers but got no (correct) reading of thermal temperatures or battery status. The ACPI core seems to be rewritten in 2.5.x kernels, I tried this too but it gave no wider success with Amilo D. Serial and parallell ports are untested too, but I doubt there would be any problems with this. Conclusion: A nice notebook, not state of the art but a cheap investment for running Linux on a portable device. The 15" TFT display is great, and it even has a floppy disk (not that it's used greatly but it feels good to have one). I'm not missing anything particular, but the battery time (in this case about 2,5 hours) is too low put we'll have to blame Intel for that I guess. Links:
Installing GNU/Linux on a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo D Notebook
Comments: |
I began by running PartitionMagic in XP environment (XP home edition came installed on the notebook and I wanted to keep it there) to size down the 20 GB harddisk so I could install Linux on separate partitions. It went fine, and I began fiddling with the Debian install/rescue disks.