Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E Series

Whilst the installation of Caldera eDesktop 2.4 (kernel 2.2.14) went smoothly and instantly provided me with a usable system^*) to work with, I wasn't very satisfied with

• an extremely low battery lifetime,
• lots of unexpected disk spinning, and most of all
• with the Lucent WaveLAN(R) Turbo 11Mb Silver PCMCIA card that wouldn't work, not even with an updated pcmcia-cs-3.1.22 (and wireless_tools.20 for that matter) whilst net access with a usual ethernet PCMCIA card wasn't a problem at all.

The solution of all three problems at once came with a simple exclusion of ports 0x140-0x17f in the PCMCIA configuration as shown in the following snippet from /etc/pcmcia/config.opts that is read by /etc/pcmcia/config:

#
# Local PCMCIA Configuration File
#
# System resources available for PCMCIA devices
#
include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0x1000-0x17ff
exclude port 0x140-0x17f
include memory 0xc0000-0xfffff
include memory 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff, memory 0x60000000-0x60ffffff   
[...]

Further reading

Additional information on Linux on laptops as well as on Linux on Lifebooks can be found at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop/.

^*) Usable for me: I don't care about the winmodem and sound support. The slow SVGA XFree 3.3.6 server was a bit annoying to begin with but as the X framebuffer didn't feel faster I left it alone.