pslog

the fujitsu lifebook b110 is a neat little notebook just too sweet to let it lay around and collect dust. but since it has only about 24 megs of ram it’s hard to get any modern os runing on it. that’s hwere DSL comes in. damn small linux is well taking care of such limits and runs almost out of the box on the lifebook.

what you need:

• dsl cd image, go to the DSL webpage and download it
• dsl floppy images of the boot floppy and the pcmcia driver floppy
• external pcmcia cdrom (they had one included with the computer when i bought it, but unfortunately i can’t boot directly from it
• floppy drive (was also included when i bought the computer

now of course you have to burn the cd and write the floppys, boot from the boot floppy and enter the folowing line at the boot prompt:

dsl xsetup frompcmcia

this will boot from the pcmcia cdrom drive and then ask you for your desired parameters for x window. this is needed because the lifebook ain’t capable of handling the default xvesa settings. you need to select the alternative (forgot the name of it, but you have only two choices, so it should be quite clear what i mean by not picking vesa )
the rest is pretty clear, you don’t need a usb mouse if you don’t have an external one attached. the internal is a ps2 mouse it seems.

now take a loot at dsl and decide wether you want to install that or look for something else .. i decided to install it…
first it might be useful to make sure you have one big empty partition to use for the install.. so open a terminal and run

sudo fdisk /dev/hda

then delete all partitions there are by pressing “d” and folowing the prompts. you can always check if there’s somethign left by pressing the “p” key which will list all partitions found.
if there isn’t any partiton left, create a new one by hitting “n” and then choose “p” for primary and “1″ to make it the first one. start at the first cylinder and end at the last one.
when you’re don with that, hit “w” to write down the partiton table and exit.
now you are ready to install dsl on the notebook

so right click on the desktop and select apps->tools->install to hard drive

folow the prompts. as install harddrive you have to choose “hda1″ (the partition you just created)
i’d not use ext3 so it will be a little faster. as boot loader i recommend using grub
once your’e done, it asks you to reboot. hit yes and the notebook will start to shut down. at some point it gets stock with just a blue screen.. i have no clue what that is, but it worked for me to just switch it off and then on again to boot.

when booting in lilo select the DSL fb800×600 option and you should soon se a nice desktop on your little notebook

after booting i inserted a pcmcia ethernet adapter, staterd the dsl panel and ran the “netcardconfig” script which immediately enabled my card and gave me access to the internet.

enabling apt-get
this is already nice, but maybe you want to have a full blown linux. luckily, dsl is based on debian, so we can get those neat tools like apt back on our laptop. there used to be a function for that under apps->tools->enable apt, but as it seems it doesn’t belong to the default install anymore. so you have to go to apps->tools->extension tool and there go to system and install the dsl-pkg.dsl

now update your apt sources and install sndconfig

apt-get update
apt-get install sndconfig
sndconfig

it will not find a pnp soundcard, so you have to choose “soundblaster” manually
these settings worked for me (just try others if this doesnt work)
io port: 0×240, irq: 5, dma 1