Laptop Fujitsu P2120 Summary
Well, I have a laptop for the last 2 years or so, which can be noted for its very light-weight and enhanced setup (it comes with full equipment – DVD-CDR combo, 802.11b, 1xPCMCIA, 2xUSB2.0, 1xFireWire, S-Video, VGA Out, Lan, Modem, etc), for only 3.2 lbs, or ~1.5Kg. However it has its disadvantages – the weak CPU (Transmeta 933MHz, which acts worse than P3 500MHz), the (very) slow HDD (40GB, but slow), and the very small VGA LCD – 10.2". Moreover, its Linux competability is not sky high, so I had to work hard to make things work correctly.
So far I have a working setup where the following list works:
1) ACPI Events*
2) PCMCIA
3) Software Suspend 2 (Aka, Hibernation, or ACPI State 4)*
4) USB, and USB devices
5) CDR/DVD
6) Floppy (as a USB Storage device)
7) VGA, and X finally stopped crashing by itself.
8) LAN – RTL8139 based, using ifplugd for detection of links, and using DHCP to obtain IP address then
9) Wireless Card, Orinoco_pci module*
The devices marked with (*) are those which I have problem with. Outside of this list, I have my FireWire untested, and I cannot activate my Modem (LT, if I’m not mistaken).
Current problems:
ACPId fails to show in the logs (/var/log/acpid) the transfer phase from AC to battery mode, and vice versa. When on AC, It says nothing. When on Bat, it prints once around every 10 minutes or so a notice about using battery mode, or that the battery is being discharged. However, on /proc/acpi/battery/CMB*/state I can see when the battery is being charged and discharged. Weird.
Software Suspend 2 has just been patched on a 2.6.11.11 kernel (I was not able to boot the 2.6.12.2 at the moment, but I will devote time for it in the near future), and is being tested as we speak. So far, it has worked remarkably well, joined with the Fbsplash, it shows a nice animation during boot time. One thing, though, which is related to Orinoco_pci module – If the Orinoco driver has no wireless network accessible, it will hang during the power-restore session, fill my logs with the comment "hermes @ MEM 0xcfc74000: Error -16 issuing command." and will not be able to function, on most cases until I hibernate/resume the computer. Even then, not always will it work. It drove me nuts, as it both abused my CPU and thus battery during battery usage, and it required I find some alternate solution. Finally I have a method of adding PCMCIA wireless card, using NDISwrapper to activate it, and removing the orinoco related modules.
Linux – Debian which was based on Knoppix, and was vastly tweaked since. Unstable, and up-to-date. My own custom kernel, and up until now, using vanilla kernel with the swsusp2 patch. Nothing fancy.
