Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E-6150
This laptop is a somewhat lightweight laptop with a slim grey/silverish design. Either a CD-rom or a floppy drive
can be inserted at a time. The floppy drive can also be connected externally. My model utilizes a Celeron 450 MHz
processor, 128 MB RAM and an integrated network interface. Additionally an extra battery is purchased which fits
into the CD-rom/floppy drive-bay.
There are several pages describing the installation of Linux on these machines, for instance on the
Linux on Laptops website.
All the pages I found described the modem modell, though. That is, the E-6150 with an internal modem instead of
a network interface. Therefore this page...
Basic Installation
I choose to use SuSE for this. One reason is that I am used to it, and another that they offer ftp installation
(I have a permanent Internet link). It took some time, and some hassling with bootdisk etc. but most problems were
not related to this particular brand or modell of laptop. I was not able to use the internal network card for this,
mostly due to the fact that I didn't know anything about this interface at installation time. Because of this I
used a PCMCIA 3Com 3c5xx card. The SuSE installation was able to use this without a hitch.
lilo was installed into MBR, and had no problems booting both Windows 2000 and Linux from a partition high up
on the disk.
Network
The internal network interface is based on an Intel 8255x controller. This is supported by the standard eepro100
module. Just load it and all should be ok. Make sure the module is loaded before any dhcp client is started, though.
You might want to add the line 'alias eth0 eepro100' to your /etc/modules.conf file.
Sound
Sound turned out to be a little challenge. SuSE has two configuration methods, SuSE's own soundconfig and
alsaconf (distributed with the ALSA sound package). SuSE tried to use ALSA's "snd-card-1968" module, whilst alsaconf
wanted to use "snd-card-esm". Additionally the kernel has support in the shape of the "maestro" module.
The method I ended up using, which mostly works just fine
is the esm-module. The relevant parts of my modules.conf file is here.
The only problem is after having booted Windows 2000. Then a full poweroff is needed before booting Linux,
otherwise the soundcard isn't recognized properly. This might be some PnP issue.
X Windows System
To configure X "SaX2" was used (SuSE's latest X configuration program). It detected the graphics chip and all details just
fine. The XF86Config file created was OK except for one glitch, which caused the keyboard to be completely unusable (could
not even get back to the console). It activated a Macintosh option in the keyboard driver section! :) Removing this from
the configuration file fixed the issue.
The XF86Config used is here
Note: The XFree86 version used is 4.0.