.-= Installing Slackware 8.0 on a Fujitsu i-4187 Laptop =-.
Last Updated: 02/11/02
This document's purpose is to serve as a reference for installing Slackware on a Fujitsu i-4187 Laptop. I began this document due to the lack of information on the Fujitsu i-4187 and linux (namely zilch). In continually updating this with my 'trials and tribulations,' I hope to help others who are interested in doing the same type of thing, as well as myself if/when it comes time to format my hard drive :) Another possible goal of mine is to discuss various aspects of hardware or software woes on this particular laptop with others that perform the same feat, and hopefully straighten out some bugs that I'm currently having, as well as keeping this page updated with any new info.
Newest Fixes/Achievements
- USB floppy drive now working!
- DVDs play great with Ogle! W00t!
- Determined upgradeability (see below)
Current Known Problems
- Modem (which I believe is a Win Modem). I haven't spent any time with this yet, but there should be linmodem drivers available for it.
- Touchpad scroll button & Lifebook Application Panel are not working. The 'rocker' scroll button isn't going to be as easy as I thought to get working. The imps/2 protocol just makes the touchpad jittery.. and from what I've read thus far, the touchpad needs to be run in "absolute" mode, which XFree86 does not currently do. I'll continue to try to find solutions for this.. for now I'm emulating the third button =(
Upgradeability
I took apart the laptop to see whether the cpu could be upgraded and would like to report to anyone who had the same question that the cpu is not upgradeable. It's soldered onto the motherboard (which BTW is about the same size as the keyboard). From the looks of it, the modem *could* be upgradeable to a network card, since it's a mini PCI-based card. Other than that and replacing the cooling fan, there's really no reason to open her up. The hard drive and memory can be upgraded from the bottom, and the DVD player (no cables, just a port inside) has only one screw in the bottom that needs to be taken out. I installed an IBM Travelstar 40GN 30gb drive (fluid ball-bearing), since the 10gb Toshiba drive that originally came with the laptop was periodically stalling. The 10gb Toshiba drive is now in my Webplayer and doing quite well.Initial Installation
If you've ever done an installation of Slackware (or any type of unix), the installation's pretty straight-foward. Partition your hard drive if you want to do any dual-booting with Micro$oft or another OS. I usually just use Parition Magic (if I already have Windows installed) because that's the way I partitioned when I first started playing around with linux, so I'm comfortable with it. The Fujitsu i-4187 has a 10gb hard drive, but when you get it from the manufacturer, you may find Windows reporting a capacity of 7.8gb or so. This is because Fujitsu installs a hidden FAT partition that contains two backup images created with DiskImage in case you fsck up your notebook. You can use Fujitsu's unhide utility to gain access to this partition, or do what I did and delete it with Partition Magic. After you're partitions are all setup, get out your Slackware CD (in my case it was Slack 8.0) and boot off of it. Log in as root and setup your linux partitions (swap & native), then enter setup and follow the menus. Yada Yada Yada.. you have a nice clean copy of Slack 8.0 installed. So that's it, right? WRONG!
USB Floppy Drive Setup
One of the bad things about this Fujitsu laptop was not having any legacy ports or a built in floppy drive. Luckily, the linux kernel has supported USB devices for quite some time (though very limited). Luckily, as time progressed, the v2.4.xx kernel has come along quite nicely and supports a variety of USB devices. I decided to do a search for USB floppy drives under linux and much to my amazement I found a great page from OZETechnology (UPDATE: Site appears to be down now) on getting a USB floppy to work on a Sony VAIO notebook on Redhat 6.2. I took their steps on what needed to be installed in the kernel to enable USB floppy support, and everything worked beautifully.
The following are the settings you need to configure in the kernel:
General Setup
Support for hot-pluggable devices -> enabled
Block Devices
Normal PC Floppy Disk Support -> disabled
SCSI
SCSI Support -> enabled
SCSI Generic Support -> enabled
SCSI Disk Support -> enabled
USB Support
Support for USB -> enabled
USB Verbose Debug Messages -> enabled (not required, but good for debugging)
Preliminary USB Device File System -> enabled
UHCI Support -> enabled
USB Mass Storage -> enabled
USB Mass Storage Verbose Debug -> enabled (again, not required, bug good for debugging)
When you've booted the new kernel..
After you've booted the new kernel, you should be able to access the drive by mounting /dev/sda to something like /mnt/floppy. Now you have floppy drive access :)
Network Setup
I had absolutely no trouble at all getting Slackware to work with my PCMCIA Linksys 10baseT net card. It was detected as an NE2000-compatible card and that was that. I haven't tried setting up the modem, but I'll post any info here if/when I do try to get it working. I really don't have a need for it at home (on a cable modem) or on the LAN out at school, but I'm sure down the road I'll be somewhere and wish I had the modem working. If you can, I'd advise purchasing a PCMCIA net card that's known to work with linux.. I had this Linksys one sitting around and figured on it being harder to setup, but to my surprise had no trouble whatsoever.
Getting X Running
You wouldn't think prying a bit of information out of Fujitsu's customer support would be all that hard, but after asking them repeatedly what the specifications were for the lcd (in terms of hsync and vsync) I was still left without an answer. All the searches I could do on groups.google.com only led me to one other person that had ANY type of linux installed on this notebook -- Redhat. I have nothing against Redhat.. in fact, it's probably a whole lot easier to get working with a laptop, but I wanted Debian or Slack, and since Debian requires over 1.5gb of CDs to be downloaded and I already had Slack 8.0 on cd, Slack was the obvious choice. I already knew the refresh rate of the LCD was 60Hz, but still had no idea on the hsync or vsync. I also had read in several places that the Mach64 driver worked perfectly with the ATI 3D Rage Mobility 4mb card that's in the i-4187, so I had that going for me. I again took a look at some of the other Fujitsu models on linux-laptop.net, specifically the E-Series. I found someone who had posted their XF86Config and took a look at the settings for both of these sync rates. Playing it safe, I chose 31.5-35.2 for the Horizontal Sync and 50-70 for the Vertical Sync. But, alas.. X kicked me out reporting the HSync was out of range. So, I tried 31.5-57 for the Hsync (as in the XF86Config for the E-Series laptop) and.. OMG IT WORKED! Now I had X completely working, with 800x600 24-bit splendid color to boot! Here's my current XF86Config file if you'd like to take a look or use it for yourself.
*Disclaimer: I make no guarantee this file will work for you or that it won't blow your machine up, all I know is it works for me and I'm happy =).
Audio -- It works!
Sound.. such a trivial thing. With any other PC I've setup with linux, sound was never an issue -- I never had a problem finding the correct module and getting it to work within minutes. This all changed, however, with the i-4187. I've heard there's a sound module available for purchase at OpenSound.com that might work, but I've also seen reports of people praising these ALSA drivers. ALSA stands for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture and is a set of freeware drivers, libs, and utilities that supposedly sounds better than a lot of the sound modules built into the kernel. In fact, I've heard that in the future the ALSA drivers may even replace the default sound drivers that are currently in the kernel.
I managed to get CD-Player sound working just fine with both ALSA 0.5.11 and 0.9.0beta6 drivers right away. I had a few bumps along the way getting mp3s and DVD sound to work (some of which was my fault, some of which are the driver's fault). XMMS would pause for about 30sec the first time I played an mp3, afterwhich songs played without a problem. I could not, for the life of me, figure this one out -- it bugged the heck out of me, to the point I felt like introducing the laptop to a sledge hammer. After hours and hours of reinstalling the drivers, searching the newsgroups and search engines, and one complete reinstall of Slackware, I think what was causing the XMMS pause was the ARTs Sound Server in KDE being auto-started. After turning that off, it seems *knock on wood* that I can finally play mp3s without a problem in KDE. Now, playing mp3s with mpg123 is a different story -- I believe it also pauses, skips some.. and just plain fumbles the mp3s up sometimes. So, in all, things are by no means figured out in the sound department, but they're coming along. If you plan on using ALSA, you might want to compare your /etc/modules.conf to my current modules.conf.
DVDs - Xine, MPlayer, or Ogle?
My first attempt at playing a DVD was very unsuccessful. I tried out XINE (a linux DVD player) and was able to get some DVDs to play and the audio working, but getting them to play without skipping was a different story. On my second attempt things went much better. I tried MPlayer and Ogle. Ogle played the DVDs without any noticeable skipping. It's also the first Linux DVD Player that lets you access the DVD's menus, much like any Windows DVD player software. I am very pleased with the performance with Ogle and that I can finally watch The Matrix and other dvds in Linux.
i-4187, The Final Frontier
Strange as this may sound, I actually enjoy tinkering around for hours trying to setup the i-4187 laptop. Linux has come a long way over the years, and I don't expect every distribution to be laptop friendly, but I'm determined to grab as much functionality out of this laptop as I can. I don't want to have to boot into Windows every time I feel like listening to music or watching a DVD.. I would like to be able to be in Linux 90% of the time, and only boot Windows up for a game or program that absolutely must be run while in Windows (ie, not through WINE). So, I need your help =) Take the dive and install Linux on this laptop if you have it or are interested in purchasing it! The distro you choose really doesn't matter, as long as there is some basis for setting up Linux on this machine that we can all discuss and learn from eachother. Together, through collaboration, we may be able to garner everything possible out of this laptop.. and if you aren't up to the challenge, well then.. I guess I'm on my own. There's just no stopping someone with a bit of determination =)
Comments? Suggestions? Did I fsck something up above? Email me: wayne@techdose.com
Please give credit where credit is due if you decide to use any of the information above for your own projects.
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