The B-Series Lifebooks seem a little rare. Information is quite hard to find and numbers are confusing. It seems that I have bought a B-2569 with builtin Bluetooth, touchscreen and 10.3" TFT.
I would strongly recommend using APM. I am using kernel 2.4.25 with APM and everything works perfectly well! WHen I close the lid the machine suspends to RAM (not only standby but real suspend!) and after one hour of being idle it suspends to disk - perfect!
The suspend-to-disk partition can be created with the Linux tool "lphdisk" which is for example part of Debian. Just be sure to have a spare primary partition (does not need to be the first) and some free disk-space (at least size of RAM + VideoRAM + 8MB).
XFreen86 V4.3 works pretty good out of the box using the "ati" driver. Though I recommend using the XVideo enhanced ati.2 driver from the GATOS project. You will then be able to watch movies in fullscreen!
The touchscreen is pretty well supported by a driver which can be found at http://stlx01.stz-softwaretechnik.de/~ke/lifebook/. From time to time it happens to me that the driver goes crazy and the pointer just jumps. Sometimes it helps switching from XFree86 to a text-console and back, sometimes only a X-server restart helps. The older version V0.7.3 does not suffer from this problem.
Since the CPU is a Intel Pentium IIIm (not Centrino!) it supports Speedstep™. I have a 700MHz CPU which can be set to 300MHz and 700MHz. For the 2.4.xx kernels you have to apply the latest CPUfreq patch from http://cvs.arm.linux.org.uk/. The driver to use is the "speedstep-smi" driver. The tricky thing are the needed parameters. It took me quite some time to figure out the following:
options speedstep_smi smi_port=0xb2 smi_cmd=0x82 smi_sig=1
I had to boot Windoze for that :(
If you load the speedstep_smi module using the above parameters you can set
the speed using the /proc/cpufreq interface. After initial load you should
get something like
minimum CPU frequency - maximum CPU frequency - policy
CPU 0 300000 kHz ( 42 %) - 700000 kHz (100 %) - performance
One drawback is that the driver fails to find the frequencies later on so you have to specify them when changing:
echo -n "0:300000:700000:powersave" > /proc/cpufreq
changes to the powersave setting, i.e. 300MHz and lower core voltage, and
echo -n "0:300000:700000:performance" > /proc/cpufreqchanges back to the performance setting.
The B-2569 has a builtin Bluetooth™ interface which is in fact a CSR chip connected via USB. The Lifebook has a strange design. The UHCI host controller provides two ports. One is open and one is connected to an internal three port USB HUB. Two of those are available to the outside world as two USB-B connectors and one is connected to the Bluetooth chipset.
The used chipset is quite old and has an old baseband firmware, mine is HCI 12.3 and BlueCore01b. Those chipsets have problems to properly connect to a USB bus. You might suffer from such problem causing "device not accepting new address" errors and the device never being attached to the USB bus.
This is caused by an unusual high reset-delay of those devices. But I found a solution. Simply edit drivers/usb/hub.c of your kernel, look for for HUB_DEBOUNCE_TIMEOUT. You should find a line similar to this:
drivers/usb/hub.c: #define HUB_DEBOUNCE_TIMEOUT 400
Now change the value to something much higher, like:
#define HUB_DEBOUNCE_TIMEOUT 1500
This does *not* have any bad impact an anything. You can apply it safely. This applies to kernel 2.4 and also 2.6!
The internal modem seems to be a SmartLink (compatible) one and can be made to work with the slmodem driver. This can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.smlink.com/linux/.
The rest of the hardware is quite standard, PIIX4 EIDE interface (embedded in i840 chipset), RTL8139 10/100 ethernet, serial port, fast IrDA port (use the smc_ircc driver!), parallel port, and i810 compatible sound (only supporting 48kHZ).
Any additional hints are absolutely welcome! If you happen to know something more please let me know!
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