The Lifebook S 5582 is a 800Mhz PIII laptop with 256M of memory, 30G of disk, and an XGA TFT screen. It is very lightweight (~4 lbs with combination DVD/CDRW installed). Floppy is a USB floppy which linux seems to understand seamlesslly (at least it did during the installation.)

The 5582 comes with a minimal number of I/O ports: V90 modem, 100-base-T ethernet, 2 USB ports, IEEE 1394, infrared, and external monitor. With the optional port extender ($145), you also get keyboard, mouse, external monitor port, parallel and serial ports.

This is a very, very sweet little machine. (I also had an S4542, so I am quite happy with the Fujitsu line.) The light weight can't be beat. If you want, you can pop out the DVD/CDRW drive and replace it with a weight saver to bring the weight down to about 3.5 lbs.

The Fujitsu's are the only very lightweight machines that come with internal CD drives.

My only complaints:

• The port extender isn't really optional; the S4542 came with one by default, but the 5582 doesn't. I ordered one the minute I unpacked the box and found out that the extender wasn't standard.
• There is no emergency recovery disk, which IMHO is a must-have for any computer. If the disk ever crashes on this machine, it's a boat anchor. Send it back to the factory. Be very careful to never trash the windoze partition on this machine.
• Instead of an emergency recovery disk, there's an emergency recovery partition, called DISE. In essense, the DISE utility allows you to copy from the backup partition into the main partition. It only takes a few minutes, and then your laptop is in the same state as when it left the factory (except that DISE won't change any partition information, so you can restore your windoze partition without losing your linux partitions.) The problem is that the DISE partition ties up one of the precious entries in the partition table.
• page up, page down, home, end keys do not exist as separate keys, but accessible via the laptop "Fn" key. I would rather sacrifice the stupid win95 keys. The S4542 had all these keys, and then some, going overboard and resulting in a key pitch that's too tight for power typing. The 5582 goes too far the other way; there's a full-sized keyboard, but with too few keys. It takes two hands to access the page functions.
• The keyboard feels a little spongy compared to the S4542, but that might just be a matter of getting used to it.

The first thing I did was to boot from the Linux install disk and examine the existing disk layout:

	type	id	size
	fat32	0b	26.4G
	ext	0f
	fat32	0b	1.45G

Hold down F2 while booting to get to the BIOS setup screen. Examine settings, learn what they mean. Turn off power management so the machine won't go to sleep in the middle of the install. Note the sound chip I/O address, DMA and interrupt.

Also: change the BIOS boot order so that the CD is booted before the hard disk.

Boot Windows.

Problem: When I repartitioned the disk, I somehow trashed its suspend-to-disk partition or file, or whatever the BIOS uses. The system became unable to suspend itself to disk, and generated an annoying warning every time I booted the system. The on-line documentation at Fujitsu says you can repair the suspend-to-disk partition or file with the PHDISK.EXE program. One problem -- there's no such program on the machine. I called tech support and they promised to email a copy of PHDISK.EXE to me, but as of this writing, it still hasn't arrived. Another option would have been to copy PHDISK from my old S4542, but that machine runs win95 and this one runs win2k so I didn't want to take the chance.

At the LILO boot prompt, just hit return. This takes you to the standard GUI installation.

I like to have seperate root, swap, and usr partitions. My new partition table looks like this:

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1          1021      3580  20563200    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda2   *         1      1020   8193118+   b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda3          3581      3648    546210   a0  IBM Thinkpad hibernation
/dev/hda5          1021      1211   1534176    b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda6          1212      1243    257008+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7          1244      1307    514048+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda8          1308      3580  18257841   83  Linux

Continue with setup; everything works beautifully. Install process correctly recognizes all hardware, including the video hardware.

Choose desired software, tell install process to go ahead, watch some TV, insert disk #2 when requested, watch some more TV. Piece of cake.

Log in; run startx. Works perfectly. If you chose graphic login, that works perfectly too.

Problem: if the system has been suspended, shutdown hangs at "saving mixer settings". It would be nice if the scripts in /etc/init.d had timeouts in them, but there you are. I will visit this in more detail later. For now, you're better off just disabling audio in the kernel, since Linux doesn't support the i810 sound chip anyway.

Note: the things discussed here are common to all Linux installs, but I thought the information would be helpful.

This information is specific to Redhat 7.2, but should be pretty close to correct for other variants.

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and set:

	HOSTNAME=myhostname.foo.com

Redhat's linuxconf has an interface for setting the hostname, but I just edit the file.

I have windows installed on the first partition of my drive (/dev/hda2). I mount it as "/dos"; it's a vfat file system; any user may mount it; it doesn't get dumped automatically and it doesn't get processed by fsck. I don't know what "unhide" means.

Hopefully the cdrom and floppy entries are self-obvious.

	Edit /etc/sysconfig/keyboard and change
		KEYTABLE="us"
	to
		KEYTABLE="falk"

Copy /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/defkeymap.map.gz to falk.map.gz

Uncompress (gunzip) falk.map.gz; edit it.

My changes:

	  44,45c48,49
	  < keycode  14 = Delete	Delete          
	  < 	control	keycode  14 = BackSpace       
	  ---
	  > keycode  14 = BackSpace	Delete
	  > 	control	keycode  14 = Delete
	  69c73
	  < keycode  29 = Control         
	  ---
	  > keycode  29 = Caps_Lock       
	  116c120
	  < keycode  58 = Caps_Lock       
	  ---
	  > keycode  58 = Control         
	  238c242
	  < keycode 111 = Remove          
	  ---
	  > keycode 111 = Delete

Create .Xmodmap file in your home directory or in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap and add these lines:

host name

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0

You should also add a line to your /etc/hosts file for the interface.

You should have a line somewhere in /etc/hosts that has the fully qualified domain name as the first name on the line, followed by the short hostname. Something like this:

To use NIS, your system needs to have an NIS domain name. (Some systems, e.g. Solaris, use the same domain name for DNS or NIS, but Redhat Linux has seperate domains. I don't know why.)

1) Install ypbind package. It's also a good idea to have yp-tools.

2) Set the NIS domain name of your system. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and add a line like this:

3) Edit /etc/yp.conf, and add a line like this:

If you don't have DNS or NIS, then this file can get pretty large, as it must contain the name of every computer you communicate with. Otherwise, it usually just holds the names of your own computer, and the few systems it needs to communicate with before DNS or NIS starts up.

Here's an example, assuming a ppp connection from home and an ethernet connection at work. My machine is named foo, and has two distinct domains. If I were to connect to my ISP and my ethernet at work simultaneously, chaos would probably result -- or at least a pretty serious firewall breach.

NFS

If you've configured your kernel for NFS client support and enabled networking, then nothing more needs to be done to be an NFS client. You simply add entries to /etc/fstab as needed. However, you may want to enable the automounter to make life easier.

To export NFS file systems for other hosts to mount, edit /etc/exports and add a line like this:

The automounter is a very convenient feature to have. You can refer to any system on your network simply as /net/remotehost/...

To enable NFS automounter: Install the am-utils RPM if it's not already installed. Automounter works automatically.

This worked right out of the box with the Redhat-supplied kernel.

I executed these commands (as root):

The SmartMedia card looks like /dev/hdc to the computer. You can mount it by either adding this entry to /etc/fstab

I prefer the /etc/fstab method, since it sets the file ownerships on the flash card to the user that mounted it. Otherwise, it gets owned by root, meaning you can't delete files.

Actually, you can enable both methods if you like; they don't interfere with each other, although it's probably not a good idea to mount the card both ways simultaneously.

I had trouble using the card; I got error messages about not being able to find the ide_cs driver. This may be an artifact of my fooling around with the pcmcia-cs package above. I was able to fix the problem by editing /etc/pcmcia/config and changing all intances of "ide_cs" to "ide-cs".

To configure the 2.4.20 kernel:

I've found that I sometimes need to reboot my system to make it recognize firewire devices. Perhaps the firewire interface is powered down during a suspend and not restored?

More on this later.

Add yourself to the "floppy" group in /etc/group so you can write floppy disks.

Default power management settings disable the ethernet interface when AC power is not plugged in. This often requires rebooting if you want to use ethernet. This feature can be disabled in the BIOS settings.

If the ethernet interface is disabled due to power management, the Kudzu package will try to uninstall the ethernet drivers from the system on boot-up. Since you won't be adding hardware to your laptop anyway, you don't need Kudzu. Disable it with this command:

If you install the enhanced version of vim, you will discover that there's some fool at Redhat who thinks his own personal working environment is the be-all and end-all of productivity, and he's turned on every single bell and whistle that vim supports. This makes vim pretty much unusable to those who are used to the normal behavior. To turn this stupidity off, remove (or rename) the file /usr/share/vim/vim58/macros.

	Hardware:
	  what				IO		IRQ	DMA
	  Disk
	    Toshiba MK3018GAP
	  Display
	    ATI Rage Mobility		1800-18FF	09
	      FD000000-FDFFFFFF		03B0-03BB
	      FC004000-FC004FFF		03C0-03DF
	      000A0000-000BFFFF
	  SMC IR port			118-11f		03	03
					2e8-2ef
	  CD: SONY CD-RW CRX800E
	  IDE: Intel 82440MX		1C90-1C9F
	    primary IDE			01F0-01F7	14
	  IEEE 1394:
	    TI OHCI Compliant
	    FC005000-FC0057FF				09
	    FC000000-FC003FFF
	  Keyboard: standard 101/102
	  Mouse: Alps Electic Co ltd			12
	  Modem:
	    Lucent Soft Modem AMR	1400-14FF	09
					1C00-1C7F
	  Monitors:
	    Default
	  PCMCIA Adapters:
	    O2Micro OZ6933		FC00-FCFF	09
	    EFFFF000-EFFFFFFF		FB00-FBFF
	    FFEFF000-FFEFFFFF
	    FFC00000-FFDFFFFF
	    000DF000-000DFFFF
	  COM1				03F8-03FF	04
	  LPT1				0378-037F
					0778-077B
	  Sound:			1000-10FF	09
	    YAMAHA AC-XG		0CC0-1CFF
	  System:
	    Intel 82440MX PCI-ISA Bridge
			  Power management controller
			  Processor to I/O controller
	    Speaker			0061-0061
	  USB: Intel 82440MX USB Universal Host Controller
					1CA0-1CBF	11