Antlinux

I got my Fujitsu Lifebook back from my mom. I had set the CMOS supervisor password on the notebook, but I never recorded anywhere what that password was. Oops. Now I can't get in to the BIOS to change the owner string...

16Nov2001 - Another note from Andrew Wai <andrew {at} wild.com.hk>: As far as I know DRI on some PCI based ati chipsets are supported so agpgart is not actually necessary for DRI support. The r128.o module can load without agpgart.o on my laptop but is not used, even when trying to load dri support in XF86Config, ie glxinfo reports 'direct rendering: no'.

15Nov2001 - I've been working unsuccesfully to get AGP working with this laptop. I've said in the past that this laptop uses the Rage 128 video chipset from ATI, but myself and Andrew Wai <andrew {at} wild.com.hk> have both been unsuccessful in getting the agpgart.o module to load, which is what you need loaded before you try to load the r128.o module for the video card. Other than that, everything is running fine with the new install. All the packages are up to date, which is real nice.

08Oct2002 - Not much going on with the laptop, I'm still running kernel 2.4.18, and 0.5 ALSA. I've been playing with the movie players in Linux a lot lately, and here's what I've found:

• xine (0.9.13): works good with DVD's, you can use the DVD navigation menus in Linux just like on a stand alone DVD player. Playing files works okay
• mplayer (0.60.0): works good with individual movie files. I got it working with DVDs, but I can't move around in the disc at all using chapter forward and reverse/skip.

20May2002 - Long time no update. Hopefully to clarify the ATI drivers situation, the ATI chipset in the laptop is a 128-bit PCI chipset; so theoretically the r128.o module would work, however, the r128.o module only written to support AGP cards, which this laptop is not. a128.o loads fine, but agpgart.o does not. This means that currently you can't do hardware accelerated OpenGL with this laptop, and this won't change untl the ATI drivers are re-written to support PCI chipsets.

11Dec2003 - Compiled kernel 2.4.22. I've added the following patches:

• Linux NTFS filesystem patch from http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
• Orinoco driver patch from Shmoo Group, for running Kismet
• usbdnet patch for use with my Zaurus PDA
• squashfs patch - squashfs is a compressed filesystem
  

To patch the different drivers, use the following commands in /usr/src:


patch -p1 -d /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/wireless/ < orinoco-0.13d-patch.diff
patch -p1 < linux-2.4.22-ntfs-2.1.4c.patch
patch -p1 < squashfs1.3r2-patch
patch -p1 < usbdnet-2.4.20-patch


11May2004 - I got the Softmodem to work (FINALLY!).

Along with the e-mails in the 13Aug2003 entry, this page helped me get started:

http://www.angelfire.com/linux/notebook/fujitsu/slmodem-Readme.txt

You'll need kernel source for your currently running kernel, and gcc to compile, and etc. If you have compiled a new kernel for your laptop, then you have enough software installed to install this modem driver. BTW, here's the kernel .config file for kernel 2.4.26. This kernel was unpatched, but don't expect it to stay that way.

Software

Mandrake - RPM based Linux distribution with GUI installer
Debian - Linux distribution with a socical concience.

• News item on how to upgrade your Potato install to kernel 2.4

prBoom - many merges and forks of various ports of the original Doom game engine from id Software.  Very cool

• More source code is on id's Source Archives page, but I recommend you look at something more 'maintained' :)

MesaGL - Open source implementation of SGI's OpenGL, I'm using this to get GL prBoom to work

Note: as of 2005 this laptop is no longer in my possession.. See the Lifebook Start Page for more info.

Here are the "notes" pages that I kept, basically a running journal that details my experiences with this laptop.

The pages below are organized by year, to (hopefully) make things a little easier to find.

I also have been keeping a duplicate of this log up on Advogato , so feel free to stop by and bump up my Certification level ;)