Welcome. This page is a quick summary of my experiences with Linux on the Fujitsu/Siemens Lifebook B-2131, which is usually just called the Biblo. The distributions I tested are Linux-Mandrake 8.0 and RedHat Linux 7.1.

Copyright © 2001 Akos Polster. This document is placed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.

Contents

Hardware Overview
Preparations
BIOS Settings
Mandrake Linux
   Installation
   Making X Work
   Making the Internal Modem Work
   Working Around Suspend/Resume Problems
RedHat Linux
   Installation
   Sound Problems
   Touchscreen
Unresolved Issues
Useful Links

You need:

• PCMCIA CD-ROM drive
• The Linux-Mandrake 8.0 CD-ROMs (both the Install and the Extension disks)
• The PCMCIA boot image copied to a floppy disk (Follow the instructions on the Install CD)
• The "ltmodem" driver package on a floppy disk. The actual file is called like ltmodem-X.YYY.tar.gz. To download it, follow the instructions on the Linmodem Resources page. We need version 5.78e or later

PCMCIA, sound and network interfaces are autodetected correctly by the installation process. The mouse is a generic PS/2.

When partitioning the disk, don't forget to create a swap partition, otherwise the install program would run out of memory and fail to install some packages like XEmacs. (This may not happen if you have more than the default 64MB RAM.)

The next step is to select the packages to be installed. Follow your needs here, but make sure the "Select individual packages" checkbox is checked: we need the kernel-source package to be installed because it is required to make the internal modem work. Don't forget to select it.

Installing the packages may take 10 to 40 minutes.

To set up the network card, you have to lie: tell the install program that your primary connection to the Internet is your LAN card, even if this is not the case. (Well actually this might be the case if you have cable or xDSL or you are on an intranet.) Anyway, don't try to configure the modem as it is not recognized yet: this is a so-called winmodem, with no direct support in the kernel. But we can make it work later.

The video card setup may lock up your system but don't worry: we will fix it in the next chapter. Important: select "XFree86 4.0.3" as the XFree version to be installed.

(Skip this chapter if the installation procedure finished succesfully, and you have a working graphics login screen after rebooting the computer.)

Ok, if the X setup has locked up your system, don't panic: reboot using the power switch on the right side (not the round button on the front panel). The machine will boot to a character-mode login prompt; log in as "root" and perform the following steps:

1. Create a backup of /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
2. In XF86Config-4, change the "Monitor", "Device" and "Screen" sections to the following:

   Section "Monitor"
     Identifier "Generic|Generic LCD Panel 800x600"
     VendorName "Generic"
     ModelName "Unknown"
     VertRefresh 40-100
     DisplaySize 200 150
     Modeline "800x600" 35.32 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync
   EndSection
   
   Section "Device"
     Identifier "Trident Cyber 9525 (generic)"
     VendorName "Unknown"
     BoardName "Unknown"
     Driver "trident"
     VideoRam 2560
     Option "UseModeLine"
   EndSection
   
   Section "Screen"
     Identifier "screen1"
     Device "Trident Cyber 9525 (generic)"
     Monitor "Generic|Generic LCD Panel 800x600"
     DefaultDepth 16
     SubSection "Display"
       Depth 16
       Modes "800x600"
     EndSubsection
   EndSection
   

3. Ensure the symbolic link /etc/X11/X exists and points to ../../usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86
4. Verify your X setup by entering

       X -probeonly

5. Edit /etc/inittab: Set the default run level to 5 instead of 3
6. Manually boot to run level 5 with the "init 5" command

You should see the graphical login screen now.

Copy the ltmodem package from the floppy you created earlier. Unpack it and follow the installation instructions.

There are two problems with APM suspend/resume: upon resume, the sound module may lock up the system, and after resume the network becomes unavailable. The workaround is to install the apmd package, replace the default network driver with another one, and completely remove the sound drivers before suspending the laptop.

Here are the steps:

1. Install the apmd package from the Install CD
2. Replace the Intel-supplied Ethernet driver (e100) by Donald Becker's eepro100: In /etc/modules.conf, change the line containing

       alias eth0 e100

   to this:

       alias eth0 eepro100

3. Restart networking:

       service network stop
       rmmod e100
       service network start

4. Copy this file to /etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/apmcontinue and make it executable for all
5. In the file /etc/sysconfig/apmd, set the variables RESTORESOUND and NET_RESTART to "yes"
6. Start the apmd service with the following command:

       service apmd restart

Generally, installation was much smoother than with Mandrake. The installer easily fit in 64MB, X did work from the beginning, and eepro100 was the selected Ethernet driver. APM did work, too.

This was somehow surprising, as RedHat Linux is mainly targeted to servers, not workstations. Congratulations, RedHat!

Sound Problems

The only problem I experienced with RedHat was the sound: XMMS did hang often, after a few seconds of playing audio. This event usually came together with the following lines in /var/log/messages:

Aug 12 15:42:28 filemon kernel: i810_audio: drain_dac, dma timeout?

Tried Google but couldn't find a solution. My problem was confirmed however by many other poor souls. So I decided to get rid of the kernel's sound driver (i810_audio), and go with ALSA, which did work perfectly with Mandrake. You can download it here; be sure to download all three packages: the driver, the library and the utilities. Installation is dead simple. For each package,

1. Extract the package
2. Go to the package directory
3. As root, type "./configure", and than "make install"

1. Go to the /etc/rc.d/rc5.d directory, and create a symlink to the ALSA startup script:

   ln -s ../init.d/alsasound S90alsasound
   

2. Go to /etc/rc.d/rc6.d, and enter:

   ln -s ../init.d/alsasound K10alsasound
   

3. In the file /etc/modules.conf, remove all lines containing "sound", and add these lines instead:

   alias char-major-116 snd
   alias char-major-14 soundcore
   alias snd-card-0 snd-card-intel8x0
   alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
   alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
   alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
   alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
   alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
   alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
   

   Just for the record, here is my complete modules.conf.
4. Finally, enter:

   depmod -a
   

1. The binary requires XFree86 4.1 or later. Too bad, RedHat 7.1 ships with 4.0. The solution is to rebuild the module from the source or to upgade to 7.2...
2. Kenan is testing on a Lifebook 2175B, which means the calibration and timeout values in XF86Config-4 should be adopted to the 2131B. I had success with these magic numbers:

       Option "MinX" "44"
       Option "MinY" "40"
       Option "MiddleX" "509"
       Option "MiddleY" "489"
       Option "MaxX" "975"
       Option "MaxY" "939"
       Option "MoveLimit" "12"
       Option "DragTimer" "30"
       Option "ClickTimer" "360"
   

The infrared port will propably work, but I didn't test it.

Suspend to disk doesn't work.

The quick keys on the front panel don't work.

Fujitsu-Siemens
Linux-Mandrake
RedHat
Linmodem Resources
ALSA: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
SuSE Linux 6.3 On The B2130
Lifebook Touchscreen Driver for XFree86 4.x
Lifebook Touchscreen Driver for XFree86 3.x
Linux on Laptops