Linux on the Fujitsu B110 "Biblo"

The first obstacle is that this subnotebook does not have a regular ATAPI CD-ROM drive. The optional Fujitsu CD-ROM drive is connected with PCMCIA. I did not buy that drive, but a Freecom drive and the Freecom IQ-Cable PC-Card (Rev. 850). This combo is mentioned on the Linux PCMCIA page.

Some Linux distributions can be installed from a FAT filesystem; I did not go that way. It turned out that the PCI/PC-Card bus gateway chip used by the Biblo (Ricoh RL5C475) is quite new. SuSE 5.3 did not initialize it correctly. The newer DLD 6.0 seemed to do, but screwed either the card or the PC-Card chip so badly that Windows 98 could not cope with it anymore without a power cycle.

I succeeded with SuSE 6.0 (PCMCIA 3.0.7). Sorry, I did not check which versions of the PCMCIA kit the other distributions had. The installation went smoothly with S.u.S.E 6.0.

This Linux distribution comes with a tool (SaX) that did a good job at auto-configuring the XFree86 server. The RPM recognized the NeoMagic chipset and installed the right server. For people without SaX I'm putting /etc/XF86Config on this website.

Since this tiny notebook only has one PCMCIA slot, I did not want to dedicate that slot to either the CD-ROM card or an Ethernet card (or a modem...). So I tweaked the PCMCIA configuration to configure the network on card insertion and deconfigure it when the card is removed. I'm using DHCP at home and in the office. But when I'm at a customer site, I frequently have to use fixed IP addresses. So I have two PCMCIA schemata for this. Lilo must be configured to provide the SCHEME environment variable that selects between them. If you want to do the same, have a look at my /etc/lilo.conf and my /etc/pcmcia/network.opts. The Ethernet card is supposedly from Kingmax (no manufacturer name is printed on the card, and it does not identify itself with a manufacturer name. Just inserting it to get the ID and putting that ID into /etc/pcmcia/config was sufficient to have it running. (It uses a Tulip chip, BTW.) That procedure is described in the PCMCIA HowTo.

A notebook needs APM configured into the kernel. And I wanted to activate the audio hardware, too. If you want to do the same, look at my Linux kernel config.

Except for the very recent PCI/PC-Card chip, this subnotebook does not make it hard to run Linux on it. I can heartily recommend it to people who travel and want to take only the minimum of a computer. Taking all the options, though, brings it to the volume and weight of a normal notebook without "stuff". My only problem with it is the small keyboard, but that can't be any larger.