Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo D 6820

I have installed GNU/Debian Woody 3.0 on this machine.

acpi - battery status

I needed to upgrade the kernel (took the now current 2.4.20 ) and patched it for acpi and swsuspend. The acpi stuff in 2.4.20 is dated 2001, and doesn't seem to be able to read battery status.
Good news 2.4.22 now finaly has acpi, one problem down, twenty to go.

http://acpi.sourceforge.net Make sure you take matching kernel version at page: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36832
acpi-20021205-2.4.20.diff.gz for kernel 2.4.20 for example.

If you like hibernate/software suspend ( writing data to your swap space ) http://sourceforge.net/projects/swsusp Hibernate seems to work from within X ( append resume=/dev/hdXY boot option, hdXY is your swap space, date gets stored there while asleep ).

My /usr/src/linux/.config file is here for kernel 2.4.20

ethernet

The network interface is a sis900 Works fine.

XFree86

I've upgraded to XFree86 4.3.0 ( current at this time ) to be able to apt-get into gnome2.2 which needs XFree4.2 at least.

XFree86 4.3 for Woody at "deb http://people.debian.org/~mmagallo/packages/xfree86/$(ARCH)/ ./" as found on www.apt-get.org
The 4.3 version brings good support for the ati mobility radeon 9000 It makes xine (film and dvd playback) and tuxracer possible.
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 to build an XFConfig-4 file in /etc/X11.
How to apt-get your woody towards gnome2.2 can be found on debianplanet.org: http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=912 Mind you that the packages url's for your /etc/apt/sources.list changed to
deb http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/mirrors.evilgeniuses.org.uk/debian/backports/woody/ gnome2.2/
or
deb http://mirror.raw.no/ gnome2.2/

harddisk

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda -> udma for faster disk access. typical:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.62 seconds =206.45 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  3.31 seconds = 19.34 MB/sec

the hdparm -d1 /dev/hda command was added to /etc/rcS.d/S55bootmisc.sh so it runs at every boot time. Done it to /dev/hdc in order to have smoother dvd playback.

pcmcia

pcmcia works ( tested ne2000 compatible card & orinoco compatible & belkin f5d6020v2 )

audio

intel810/sis7012 chipset I've tried alsa 0.9.2 ( compiled & installed from source alsa-project ). after booting alsa has a lot of modules loaded: lsmod.
Using alsa via oss emulation gives very distorted audio (lots of programs still expect to use /dev/dsp for 'normal' oss sound. This emulation is Completely Worthless for me on this hardware. Lucky there is an alsa-output-plugin for xmms! This gives clean audio ( as good as you expect audio from a portable's speaker: crappy, but not distorted ). One day when I must check why oss-emulation is so broken.
So I tried to get esd to talk to native alsa instead of using oss emulation.( esd is the audio daemon that comes with Gnome ). Compiled esound 0.2.29 ./configure --with-alsa --with-esd-dir=/usr/bin this gives the same distorted, crackling sound as the oss-emulation mentioned before.
This 0.2.29 ( esd --version ) gives on the last line of usage text ( with esd -h ):
Possible devices are: hw:0 (SiS SI7012)
So I *hope* it does not use oss-emu unwanted instead of native alsa. What a mess.

cdrecord -scanbus works, hdX=ide-scsi boot option, needs some modules ( scsi_mod, ide_scsi, sg ( scsi generic) ). Grip can rip audio-cd

dvd playback. Compiled xine with alsa audio ( xine -A alsa ) The xine usage gives the possible audio outputs ( alsa, esd, oss, ... ). Seems to work fairly well after upgrading XFree to 4.3 Make sure to run xine-check for hints.

Have not tested yet:

usb2.0 & firewire ( host adapters seem to detect fine, but own no devices to test ).
( plain old telephone system ) modem. Don't have telephone line so ...

lspci -vv output

Knoppix 3.1 ( bootable, live cd, no harddisk needed gnu/debian distribution ) worked fine.

Consumerism:

Paid 1400 or 1500 Euro in carrefour shop in .be in february 2003 Including m$-XP tax.
The only missing feature seems to be infrared port on the other hand it still has an ancient db9 serial port! And a floppy drive inside. Funky %-)
Searching the web to buy a spare battery returned nil.
Battery life is less then 3 hours ( 2 GHZ celeron cpu ).

Linux Kernel 2.6

Upgrading kernels get a lot easier, since 2.6 supports acpi, recent pcmcia, wireless, alsa, ... out of the box. I used the kernel-image as found on www.backports.org. Had to load extra modules that didn't exist in 2.4 evdev, mousedev, psmouse for the synaptics touchpad, battery and ac for acpi to make the gnome panel applet happy. sis5513 for dma disk access.

 hdparm -tT /dev/hda
 
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   1488 MB in  2.00 seconds = 743.00 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   60 MB in  3.10 seconds =  19.33 MB/sec

If now only the powers-that-be could put freeswan ipsec in the kernel ... one can only hope.