Installing Linux on a Fujitsu C2230

At the moment, this is a quick-and-dirty page to help others out. I'll clean it up later. Check back often!


Day 1 (2/2/04): Received the laptop. Spent some time playing around with Windows XP Home to ensure everything worked correctly. Booted into Knoppix to verify the basic functionality works. It does, although Knoppix only puts a 1024x768 screen up, so there's a large black space around it until I figure out the display compensation. (Fn+F5, by the way.)

Day 2 (2/3/04): Downloaded Mandrake 9.2 Disc 1 in order to use its disc partitioning software built into the Mandrake installer. It's very good and gives you a nice graphical representation of what is going where. I do that once, install Slackware 9.1, then I realize that the Mandrake installer has made all of the Linux partitions "extended"...so I had no good way to boot it (without risking damage to my Windows XP install). Re-do the disk partitioning making certain that the root partition is a "primary" partition. I leave about 9 gigs for WinXP, 300 megs for /home, 256 meg swap, and the rest (except for the recovery partition) is /, which is about 45 megs.

Sound: It's an ali5451 card. Note: I didn't get any sound out of it until I turned up the headphone volume (and master and PCM, of course) in alsamixer. Works well now, though.

Network: It's an 8139too driver.

X Windows: I messed around with several X Windows configurators for a while and kept running into a brick wall because I didn't know the horizontal and vertical refresh rates of the monitor. Then, I think I used xf86cfg to make this configuration...and it comes up at an eye-straining 1400x1050 at 24 bits. Not bad. I'll work on it more later, but it's nice to have it working.

Day 3 (2/4/04): Wireless card working. You have to download the MadWifi driver using CVS here. Don't forget to turn the switch on. (Guess why I put that here?) :)

Update: I've created this little script you can run through Apache to report any local b/g networks. It's only for the atheros card, no guarantees that it works for you or anything like that. If you have suggested changes, e-mail me and I might put them in if I have time and inclination.

Touchpad: I can't get the scroll working. The down button is "Button 2", but the up button doesn't register on xev at all...

Day 4 (2/5/04): Modem not working. Intel has a driver for it available, but it only runs on 2.4 series of kernels. Hopefully they'll update to 2.6 soon. For now, I have a PCMCIA hardware modem I can use. (Thanks to Intel for releasing a Linux driver for this modem.)

Keyboard scan codes: Here are the scan codes for some of the keys on the keyboard, including the volume up/down, mute, and Windows key. In theory, you should be able to make them control the volume, etc. I couldn't get them working to my liking though.

Update: it occurred to me that I could set up KDE icons to do the things I want, such as volume up/down, then assign them to the hotkeys. Using this .Xmodmap file, I set up commands in the KDE Menu to increase the volume, decrease the volume, and toggle the mute. I put the linked .desktop files in ~/.kde/share/apps/Multimedia/More/; don't forget to run xmodmap .Xmodmap with the above file each time you start X for this to work.

Note: I recommend turning down the "Launch Feedback" to a shorter time, because otherwise every time you use one of the keys your cursor will be blinking for 30 seconds. Also, note that I've had the KDE shortcut keystroke handler (khotkeys) crash on me after repeated uses. This option is definitely sub-optimal, but it's better than nothing...

Memory Stick Reader: This is a little dicey. O2Micro will (apparently - I sent the e-mail but haven't heard back yet) send you the driver, according to this page. No open-source driver (but then that's true for several pieces of hardware in this laptop).

I'm still working on this laptop, so updates are frequent.


URL: http://www.rjmarq.org/c2230/
Written by RJ Marquette on 2/4/04.
Copyright © 2004 RJ Marquette. webmaster@rjmarq.org