UPDATE
Most of the info on this page is not worthwhile anymore as this notebook works fine with all recent distributions. I will leave it up as reference however, as the module information is relevant.
UPDATE
I recently got a mail from Rob McMullen, and he pointed to me a page with a patch for the ali chip set. I have tried the patch on 2.4.18 and it works. Please see the page here
After posting on comp.os.linux.portables about installing Linux on my lifebook I have gotten quite a few emails regarding the subject. Since there is a dearth of information about doing this on the web, I thought it would be best to get all the information I could up for others to see. I welcome any additions, comments, or criticisms about this page. Please send them to the following address.
Please also see Rob McMullen's page about installing Gentoo Linux on the lifebook.
The information on this web page is not endorsed by Fujitsu. This page was created simply to disseminate information to those parties interested in installing Linux on the Lifebook P 2040. I can not take any responsibility if you do something to mess up you laptop. Use these instructions at your own risk.
In general Linux runs just fine on this laptop. There are some issues I still don't understand, and am investigating, but you should be able to get the laptop up and running at 80 - 90 percent functionality without any effort at all. Here is a summary of the hardware in the P 2040 with a blurb about whether it works or not.
| Device/Feature | Information |
|---|---|
| Sound | Use trident.o. |
| LCD Display | Works at max 1280x768 resolution. See X section below. |
| Keyboard/Built in Mouse Pointer | Works as 3 button mouse, no problems encountered. |
| Application Launch buttons/LED Mail Indicator | Haven't tried anything yet, you might try here . |
| USB Support | Use usb-ohci.o. |
| USB Floppy Drive | Booting from it is no problem, I have not tried mounting it but here is a page with USB floppy info. |
| Firewire | Have not tried this yet. I don't own any firewire devices. I would welcome any reports that I will add here. |
| Ethernet port | Use 8139too.o. |
| CDRW/DVD | It has worked flawlessly for reading, I have not yet tried to burn a CD yet. It uses ide-scsi mode so I assume it will work. |
| APM | Suspend works, Standby appears to work. Needs more testing. |
| Graphics Chip | ATI Rage mobility M4. Full support in X. |
| S Video Out | Have not tried this. Reports are welcome. |
| PCMCIA | Have not tried this. Reports are welcome. |
| Modem | Reported by windows as Lucent Tech Soft Modem AMR. The linmodem website seems to suggest there is no support for this modem. lspci -vv does not seem to include anything with a modem description in it either. |
Installing was a bit of a painful process to figure out for the first time, but with these instructions it would be easy to do again. The problem is that all of the latest Linux distributions that I tried would crash during the initial boot. I did not try any 2.2.X based kernels, so that may be another option to pursue. The description of what I did to overcome this problem is very long and fraught with many perils so I will try to put only the salient points here. Perhaps it might be of use to someone else in the near future.
The problem was Linux would not boot. It was simply freezing while detecting the IDE chipset. My first instinct was to go poking around in the kernel source and see if I could figure out what was causing the freeze. Unfortunately, I made a terrible mistake in that I misidentified the device probing that was causing the freeze as being a different chipset than what is installed in the lifebook (I had only had the notebook for a day, remember!). Chalk it up to the lateness of the hour, or just a general brain fart. Since the device probing that was causing the crash was by the same manufacturer, I made the incorrect assumption that maybe the chipsets were close enough to cause some kind of conflict while probing. I disabled the offending IDE chipset in the kernel configuration and was able to get a bootable kernel. A bootable kernel with no DMA for the IDE of course.
With a bootable kernel, I conspired to replace the kernel on the Redhat 7.2 boot floppy. I was aided in this endeavor by Ed Bailey and Michael Lee Yohe of Redhat when I asked where to get the kernel configurations used for the boot floppy in newsgroups. With the new kernel I compiled, I was able to boot off the floppy, and install RH72 without any further problems.
After I had been using Linux for a couple of days, I noticed that the IDE chipset I had disabled was the chipset installed in the laptop. Before I had time to make anything of this I got an email from Bruce Howard saying he had similar problems with his Sony laptop. He found that booting with the boot parameter PCI=conf2 he was able to use the IDE, but not any of his other devices. I tried booting the lifebook similarly and I experienced the same problem, the IDE chipset is detected properly, but all of the other IDE devices fail to work properly. Rob McMullen later emailed me and informed me that he was unable to install either Mandrake or Gentoo Linux using PCI=conf2 to boot. He said both installations fail in the second stage.
The instructions outlined here in this section are a streamlined form of what I did to get RH72 installed.
You are going to need to compile a kernel with the ALI M15x3 chipset disabled. You will want to use this kernel to replace the kernel that is on the floppy.img on Redhat 7.2 CD 1. I have provided the files at each step down below. You can either do it all yourself, or pick up one of the files I have supplied for you here below, and start from that point.
1. Get the original config file from the source RPM, kernel-2.4.7-10-i386-boot.config
2. Change the kernel config to disable the ALI M15x3 chipset.
3. Compile the new kernel.
4. Copy the boot floppy image off the Redhat CD to your hard drive.
5. Mount the boot floppy using the following comand:
mount -o loop FLOPPYIMAGEFILE /path/to/directory
6. Replace the kernel image on the boot floppy with the image you compiled.
7. Unmount the image to save the changes. Now the image file should boot on the lifebook. RH72lifebookbootfloppy.img.bz2
8. Copy the image file to a floppy with the following command:
dd FLOPPYIMAGEFILE /dev/fd0
9. Boot off the floppy, and install Redhat.
After installation completes, the kernel that RedHat installs on the hard disk will also fail to boot. You can boot using the CD and boot floppy as a rescue disk, and copy the kernel from the boot floppy over, similar to the above steps. I would recommend creating a new custom kernel at that point as the boot floppy does not have very much compiled into it. You might find it easiest to start from the kernel-2.4.7-10.i386.config for your new kernel. I used 2.4.17 for my new kernel.
Add the following lines to you XF86Config-4 file:
Modeline "1024x768" 65 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync
Modeline "1280x1024" 108 1280 1328 1440 1688 1024 1025 1028 1066 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "1280x768" 108 1280 1328 1440 1688 768 771 777 806 +hsync -vsync
And change the Modes to include your new screen resolutions
Modes "1280x768" "1024x768" "800x600"
Any suggestions or comments? email me.
Also, please check out my employer if you are looking for driver development or custom application development for linux or windows