Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro v2040

Installing Gentoo on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro v2040

[previously: Ubuntu 5.10 (preview)]

I will try to describe here my experience using this notebook, I hope it might appear helpful to some of you. Enjoy!

The official site of the Amilo Pro V Edition: http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/sme/products/mobile/notebooks/amilo_prov_edition.html.

Last updated: March 30th, 2011 00:00:00

General Hardware Specifications of Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro v2040:

Kind-a-blog

• September 13^th, 2005 - Notebook ordered, delivery expected on September 16^th. I had a choice of other notebooks meeting my requirements, but this one appeared to offer a good value to price ratio and was actually available. I've been thinking about a (cheaper) Acer with similar capabilities, but that one was not available at the moment.
  So I ended up with a Fujitsu-Siemens notebook, I had some recommendations for F-J notebooks, this made the decision easier.
  I am going to install Linux apart from Windows XP Professional, the Serial ATA HDD promises some troubles, I hope I will be able to overcome those anyway.
• September 16^th, 2005 - Delivery delayed...
• September 19^th, 2005 - Notebook finally arrived. First impressions are quite good.
  The Wireless LAN interface is disabled by default in BIOS - spent some time to figure this out.
• September 20^th, 2005 - Strange problem with the keyboard - appears to loose some keypresses when typing fast. Slightly annoying.
  Tried installing Debian 3.1 - no luck, the SATA HDD is not detected.
  Made a short try with Ubuntu 5.10 - this one detected the HDD but got stuck during repartition attempts. I will probably give up repartitioning NTFS and partition manually from scratch.
• September 21^st, 2005 - Called the Fujitsu-Siemens support in Poland. The keyboard problem appears to be well-known - they promised to send me a new keyboard firmware.
  Tried Ubuntu 5.10 again. When the interface got stuck trying to run the repartition software, I launched the ntfsresize manually in the second shell (Alt+F2). The resize went on successfully, full description of the process is available at: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html. After resizing, I restarted the PC and the Ubuntu installer went on without further problems. Still to be done: wlan and soundcard. Both appear to be working okay from the point of view of the OS. However the network does not work, nor the sound is coming out from speakers. I'll check this out tomorrow evening. Anyway, the installation was successful, much easier than I expected!
• September 28^th, 2005 - Received the update from Polish Fujitsu-Siemens support service. The keyboard works very well now. I have been requested not to distribute the keyboard BIOS update, so if you need this as well, call your support!
• October 14^th, 2005 - Using the notebook for almost a month now, I must say it is working very well. The battery lasts for about 3-4 hours with normal work, which is enough for me. I am mostly working under Windows at the moment, the fight with Linux drivers for wlan and soundcard is waiting for some spare time. I am thinking about starting from scratch with Gentoo, but this requires time, and I am slightly busy last weeks.
  The only thing that sucks in this notebook are speakers, could have been better, really. Hardly usable for watching movies, not to mention high quality music. Just okay for system messages etc. Fortunately, there is no problem with the sound quality at all when using headphones or external speakers.
• November 1^st, 2005 - Started from scratch with Gentoo. Seems to be a good choice, the wlan card got started without a problem. It was sooo simple: I compiled the kernel and then called 'emerge ipw2200'. Then went through iwconfig et voila! Nothing special with the kernel config, just remember to add wireless lan support.
• November 6^th, 2005 - Permanently configured the wlan card, nothing special about it. I am connected with the wlan card at the moment of writing it, works well.
  I think I am getting closer to resolving the soundcard issue. The soundcard ALMOST works (hi) when used the most recent snd-hda-intel module (package 1.0.10rc2). The CD playing works okay, and PCM output works ONLY with gstreamer (strange). You can try this yourself: `gst-launch sinesrc ! alsasink' . The playback works UNTIL you touch anything in the alsamixer, if you do, the sound disappears completely (including the CD). You can re-enable the sound output by closing the gstreamer application and gog through all relevant outputs in alsamixer and muting/unmuting them. The CD playback should return. I tried many optional models in the snd-hda-intel, unfortunately no real change in the driver behaviour.
  If you are interested, you can check the output of: lspci, lshw and dmesg outputs. Unique hardware id numbers were removed.
• November 14^th, 2005 - Dario Ferroni (can be contacted at dario (dot) ferroni (at) removeit (dot) acantho (dot) com ) informed me that he has successfully installed Kubuntu on his V2040. The soundcard doesn't work for him either.
• November 17^th, 2005 - SebastianR sent me a patch to test, solving the soundcard issue. Sebastian writes:
  (...)Last week I bought an Amilo Pro V2040. When I installed Linux, I could not get sound to work either. I debugged this a little, and my conclusion is that the sound chip reports that there are two surround channels, but then crashes when Linux tries to actually use them. When I removed that code, it worked for me.(...)
  It should be shortly included in the Alsa distribution.

Please DO NOT ask me for sending you the keyboard firmware upgrade.
You can ask for it at your local Fujitsu-Siemens support. If, for some unfortunate reason, the firmware upgrade fails without the support being informed about the upgrade, you will probably render the notebook unusable and loose your guarantee.

Contact: sq5bpm (at) wp (dot) pl

Last modified: March 30th, 2011 00:00:00