Fujitsu i-4187 & Slack 8

USB Floppy Drive Setup

One of the bad things about this Fujitsu laptop was not having any legacy ports or a built in floppy drive. Luckily, the linux kernel has supported USB devices for quite some time (though very limited). Luckily, as time progressed, the v2.4.xx kernel has come along quite nicely and supports a variety of USB devices. I decided to do a search for USB floppy drives under linux and much to my amazement I found a great page from OZETechnology (UPDATE: Site appears to be down now) on getting a USB floppy to work on a Sony VAIO notebook on Redhat 6.2. I took their steps on what needed to be installed in the kernel to enable USB floppy support, and everything worked beautifully.

The following are the settings you need to configure in the kernel:

General Setup
  Support for hot-pluggable devices -> enabled

Block Devices
  Normal PC Floppy Disk Support -> disabled

SCSI
  SCSI Support -> enabled
  SCSI Generic Support -> enabled
  SCSI Disk Support -> enabled

USB Support
  Support for USB -> enabled
  USB Verbose Debug Messages -> enabled (not required, but good for debugging)
  Preliminary USB Device File System -> enabled
  UHCI Support -> enabled
  USB Mass Storage -> enabled
  USB Mass Storage Verbose Debug -> enabled (again, not required, bug good for debugging)

When you've booted the new kernel..
After you've booted the new kernel, you should be able to access the drive by mounting /dev/sda to something like /mnt/floppy. Now you have floppy drive access :)

Network Setup

I had absolutely no trouble at all getting Slackware to work with my PCMCIA Linksys 10baseT net card. It was detected as an NE2000-compatible card and that was that. I haven't tried setting up the modem, but I'll post any info here if/when I do try to get it working. I really don't have a need for it at home (on a cable modem) or on the LAN out at school, but I'm sure down the road I'll be somewhere and wish I had the modem working. If you can, I'd advise purchasing a PCMCIA net card that's known to work with linux.. I had this Linksys one sitting around and figured on it being harder to setup, but to my surprise had no trouble whatsoever.

Getting X Running

You wouldn't think prying a bit of information out of Fujitsu's customer support would be all that hard, but after asking them repeatedly what the specifications were for the lcd (in terms of hsync and vsync) I was still left without an answer. All the searches I could do on groups.google.com only led me to one other person that had ANY type of linux installed on this notebook -- Redhat. I have nothing against Redhat.. in fact, it's probably a whole lot easier to get working with a laptop, but I wanted Debian or Slack, and since Debian requires over 1.5gb of CDs to be downloaded and I already had Slack 8.0 on cd, Slack was the obvious choice. I already knew the refresh rate of the LCD was 60Hz, but still had no idea on the hsync or vsync. I also had read in several places that the Mach64 driver worked perfectly with the ATI 3D Rage Mobility 4mb card that's in the i-4187, so I had that going for me. I again took a look at some of the other Fujitsu models on linux-laptop.net, specifically the E-Series. I found someone who had posted their XF86Config and took a look at the settings for both of these sync rates. Playing it safe, I chose 31.5-35.2 for the Horizontal Sync and 50-70 for the Vertical Sync. But, alas.. X kicked me out reporting the HSync was out of range. So, I tried 31.5-57 for the Hsync (as in the XF86Config for the E-Series laptop) and.. OMG IT WORKED! Now I had X completely working, with 800x600 24-bit splendid color to boot! Here's my current XF86Config file if you'd like to take a look or use it for yourself.

*Disclaimer: I make no guarantee this file will work for you or that it won't blow your machine up, all I know is it works for me and I'm happy =).