This is an attempt to share my knowledge about the installation of SUSE Linux 9.1 on a Jewel Topaz 9500 laptop.

Although not unfamiliar with Linux I still was a little apprehensive when I had to shop for a new laptop (my previous one, a Sony Vaio, having been stolen). The Vaio (which ran SuSE 8.2) still had some problems that were difficult, or impossible, to solve and I didn't want to spent a lot of time getting some Linux-unfriendly laptop up and running. But a friend of mine just bought a laptop himself after weeks of research, and installed 9.1 on it without problems. Trusting him, and taking the easy way out, I bought myself a Jewel Topaz 9500 too.

Hardware

The '9500 has a lot of goodies although it doesn't show a lot of that on the outside: no flashy blue lights (that only serve to drain the battery) or hardware MP3 player (heck, who needs a hardware player when there is xmms?). Here is an overview of what's inside and what is supported:

Installing SUSE 9.1

I've used nearly every SuSE release since 5.3, and with every new release I'm impressed by the ease of installation. Just pop in the DVD and of you go (the 8.2 DVD gave me problems: while YaST was looking for package information it stalled with an error indicating something like 'I want to read sector 12345 but can only go so far as 12340'. The CDs were OK though).

Hardware configuration

CPU

This notebook is based on Intel's Centrino mobile technology, which includes an 1.4 GHz CPU, codename 'Banias'. You can read the press release here. The feature I like most, from a notebook point of few, is the Speedstep: when demand is low, the CPU frequency and/or voltage is throttled back automatically, saving of energy == battery life. Usually mine runs at 600 MHz, except when, e.g., compiling stuff or encoding MP3s.

I didn't have problems with the ACPI (in this sense that the machine runs properly with ACPI enabled), but there are a few quircks:

• throttling doesn't work: it'll hang the machine, requiring a reboot. I consider this a nuisance but notmore than that, since SpeedStep takes care of power management.
• suspend/stby modes do not work (at least, not out of the box)

Fan speed is also modulated by ACPI. Most of the time the fan is off, but under load (when the CPU heats up), fan speed is increased in steps. Funnily, after booting up the fan is constantly on, keeping the CPU at around room temperature (sic). When the temperature increases to approximately 42 °C the fan switches off, when temperature increases further to approx. 46 °C it switches on again. A temperature drop below 38 °C makes the fan go off, after which the temperature stabilizes at around 32 °C.

For monitoring battery state I use kacpi an older version of kacpi that I compiled for my previous laptop and restored from backup. Kacpi is now called Kapacity, I haven't tried it but you can get it re last time I checked.

Graphics

The XGA (LCD) display is set to a resolution of 1024x768, 24 bit colour and a refreshrate of 75 Hz. It uses Intel's 855 GM graphics card which is supported by XFree86's i810 module (provided by SUSE). Acceleration and DRI are enabled.
Note that, since SaX sets the permission on the DRI module to 0660 (check my XF86Config file), you have to be a member of the 'video' group for DRI to work.

I am not an expert as far as LCD screens are concerned, but I'm not too impressed by the quality of the screen: brightness and contrast reduce quickly under a less-than-optimum viewing angle. On the other hand: the brightness keys on the keyboard work out of the box, and brightness can be increased to a very high level. The screen also dims a bit when you switch from mains to battery power.

The display power management settings in Control Center don't seem to work. Maybe there's something I overlooked.

You can find my XF86Config here. I modified it by hand to include a section for my USB mouse. SaX/YaST can configure only one mouse and I do not want to choose between the touchpad and my chordless :-)

Hard disk

By default UDMA is not enabled during an installation. Don't forget to enable it in Control Center because it will speed up your system considerably. Mine uses UltraDMA 100.

Network card

The network card is detected and setup correctly by YaST. Nothing to configure there.

LAN

The notebooks with Centrino mobile technology come with a built-in wireless LAN adapter, called the "Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection mini PCI adapter". Drivers are not available from Intel, but there is a project on Sourceforge that made one. SUSE supplies it as part of the Yast Online Update, and that is the version I'm working with.

There was still an issue getting the thing to work properly though. Upon initialization the following message appeared in my system log:

Nov 13 13:27:19 orion kernel: eth0: RF Kill state changed to radio OFF.

I could ping the interface, eth0, but there was no connection possible with my wireless access point. I suppose that's what the extra keyboard button (over the key) takes care of under Windows. But it doesn't work under Linux.

But I found the Wireless Radio Software Switch project, that makes a kernel module to enable the radio. Only, it hadn't been tested on this laptop. In that case there's only one thing to do: try it out. So I compiled the module (there's two, actually), installed it and did a modprobe av5100... and the radio light just below the screen came on! No further tweaking was necessary.

Sound

The soundcard uses the AC'97 codec and the snd-intel8x0 module. I use OSS as the sound I/O method. If you have no audio make sure that the volume for PCM is set to an audible level. Some apps appear to set it to zero.

Modem

The built-in PCI-modem is a softmodem, which doesn't work with SUSE out of the box because YaST can't find it. The hsflinmodem utility is of no use either. While googling I found scanModem from this Linmodems support site. This utility can be used to probe for the characteristics of PCI (soft)modems.

scanModem generates two output files with a lot of information. From those I learned that SmartLink makes drivers for this modem.

Here is some of the device-related output that scanModem generated:

--------- lspci scan ----------------
:
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Modem (rev 03)
:

and...

:
Modem candidates are at PCI_buses:  00:1f.6
 Providing detail for device at PCI_bus:
00:1f.6
00:1f.6 Class 0703: 8086:24c6 (rev 03)
        Subsystem: 1509:2971
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [Generic])
        Subsystem: FIRST INTERNATIONAL Computer Inc: Unknown device 2971
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10
        I/O ports at 2400 [size=256]
    Primary PCI_id:   8086:24c6
     with VendorID:   8086
      and DeviceID:        24c6
  SubSystem PCI_id:   1509:2971
  with subVendorID:   1509
   and subDeviceID:        2971
:

Tip: run scanModem as root, since it generates more info that way than when running as an ordinary user.

I downloaded SmartLink's slmodem driver (version 2.9.2) from their ftp site and installed according to the instructions in the README. (Note: this driver does not fall under the GPL license: installing it will taint the kernel). You need to be root to install this driver, and you also need to have the kernel header files installed. This is all explained in the docs that come with the driver.

After the driver installation it had to be inserted into the running kernel, as a module, and activated. This is done with a

# modprobe slamr
# /usr/sbin/slmodemd --country=NETHERLANDS /dev/slamr0 &

Then I went into YaST to integrate it into my existing system. Unfortunately YaST is not yet able to configure PCI modems, so I could not configure it properly. My solution was to first install an external (hardware) modem, pointing it to /dev/modem (which is a symlink to /dev/ttyS0) and once that worked I 'rerouted' the symlink /dev/modem to point to /dev/ttySL0, the device corresponding to the softmodem.

I used to use kppp to establish the PPP connection because it gave better results than kinternet (higher throughput). Here is my kppprc file, if you're interested.

That's nearly it. The make install modifes /etc/modules.conf, so the slamr module is inserted into the running kernel when required. To ensure slmodemd is started every time my system boots, I added the line /usr/sbin/slmodemd --country=NETHERLANDS /dev/slamr0 & to my boot.local file.

Still, very often I wasn't able to connect to my ISP. The modem would dial out but handshake failed and the pppd process wouldn't start. Recently I upgraded my connection from a 56k modem to ADSL and now I can't be bothered to fix the modem stuff. I expect it to be more of a problem with the chat/pppd script then with the hardware itself.