Samsung P30

SuSE Linux Professional 9.1 installation report

Well, of course I didn't just blindly buy this nice notebook but checked beforehand how much trouble it would give me when trying to run Linux on it... and I have to say that I wasn't disappointed. Here's the results of my SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional installation and its 2.6.5-based kernel.

Matthias Hentges has a similar report for Debian "Sid", Hanno Böck for Gentoo Linux.

Overview

	2.6.5 (SuSE 9.1)
Installation	Ok
ACPI BIOS	Ok (but BIOS has errors)
Special keys	With ACPI4Asus driver, untested
ACPI Standby (S1), Suspend-to-RAM (S3), Suspend-to-Disk (S4)	Suspend-to-disk works
Speedstepping with cpufreqd	Ok (patched DSDT recommended)
IDE (UDMA modes)	Ok
XFree86	Ok
DRM	Untested
Sound	Ok
LAN	Ok, 8139too driver
Centrino WLAN	Ok (with ipw2200)
USB	Ok
Firewire	Untested, but should work
IrDA	Ok
PCMCIA	Ok
Modem	Untested
Card reader	Unsupported
Touchpad / External Intellimouse Optical USB	Work after hand-optimization

ACPI BIOS

Please see the section in my my 9.2 report.

Special keys

The four keys next to the power button (three programmable launch keys and a WLAN enable/disable key) do not work even in Windows without a special driver. Under Windows, Samsung ships an "ATK driver", which, surprise surprise, seems identical to Asus's "ATK0100" driver.

Accordingly, Matthias Hentges discovered that the existing Linux driver for Asus notebooks, ACPI4Asus , could be modified to support the P30. v0.28 and later should support the special keys.

Note however that I haven't tried the driver on SuSE Linux 9.1, but it worked for me under my previous 9.0 installation.

ACPI Standby (S1), Suspend-to-RAM (S3), Suspend-to-Disk (S4)

Suspend-to-RAM does not work yet, period.

With SuSE Linux 9.1, suspend-to-disk works but needs to be enabled manually in the /etc/powersave.conf file. Set POWERSAVED_DISABLE_USER_SUSPEND to "no" and the kpowersave KDE tray icon will offer you the Suspend option, which reuses the swap partition.

In case of trouble, look in /etc/sysconfig/powersave and add any problematic modules that may cause trouble.

Speedstepping with cpufreqd

Please see the section in my my 9.2 report.

DRM

OLD INFORMATION FOR SUSE 9.0 (unverified for 9.1):

To get 3D acceleration, I had to patch radeon.h in the DRM source code so that it recognizes the graphics chip (just because XFree86 from the CVS recognizes the chip does not mean the radeon DRM module does, too). Change the end of the #define DRIVER_PCI_IDS definition as follows, including the trailing backslash:

{0x1002, 0x5C63, 0, "ATI Radeon RV280 Mobility 9200 M9"}, \
{0, 0, 0, NULL}

Recompile and install the radeon.o module, then you should get a message such as the following in syslog upon starting XFree86, provided you load DRI support in your XF86Config:

kernel: [drm] Initialized radeon 1.10.0 20020828 on minor 0: ATI Radeon RV280 Mobility 9200 M9

I did succeed in getting tuxracer and Unreal Tournament 2003 to run (the latter after manually installing the latest patch), but the graphics suck and the game was unplayable, not because it was too slow but the movement was jerky and stuff, and since I kept Windows XP on the notebook, I just dropped UT2003.

Wireless LAN

Basically you've got three choices:

driverloader
ndiswrapper
ipw2100 / ipw2200

Driverloader is a commercial product that fools existing Windows NDIS drivers into thinking that they got their Windows environment and thus makes it possible to use Windows drivers. But it's a.) commercial and b.) comes with a stupid local webserver for configuration.

ndiswrapper is exactly the same but open-source. However all ndiswrapper versions locked up my machine in a way that the keyboard was nearly dead. Ctrl-Alt-Del was recognized, init also reported that it was switching in runlevel 6, but wasn't really successful in performing the shutdown procedure.

Interestingly, ndiswrapper seemed to work for Matthias and others. Also, enabling the WLAN module using the WLAN key - thanks to the ACPI4Asus driver -, did not help either. So no luck with ndiswrapper.

The "official" ipw2100 driver worked for me once, but I upgraded my Mini-PCI WLAN module to the 2200BG model (54 MBit/s). Meanwhile the ipw2200 driver is mature enough for deployment, but has to be fiddled into SuSE's sysconfig/networking scheme manually.

IrDA

Works, but you need to make sure that the serial module is not active on the appropriate /dev device.

Card reader

The P30 features a card reader for Multimedia cards (MMC) and their "secure" variant SD cards. It is built into the PCMCIA controller, a R5C590 (specsheet).

It's also strange in that its Windows XP driver does not appear in the device manager (and the Windows Explorer) until you insert a MMC or SD media. Then, if you switch the device manager to view devices by bus connection, a device "RICOH SD/MMC controller" appears below the Ricoh R/RL/5C476(II) card bus controller, so it seems as if it is somehow internally attached like a PC card. The driver reports a mapping into memory area F6BF8000 - F6BF8FFF, but I don't know whether that mapping stays permanent.

Under Linux, if you insert a card, PCMCIA's cardmgr will report an "unsupported card in socket 0" with "product info: 'RICOH', 'Bay1Controller'". cardctl ident in addition reports "manfid: 0x0000, 0x0000", "function: 254 ((null))". So in other words, no support, although a driver should be theoretically possible by means of reverse-engineering or such...

Touchpad / External Intellimouse Optical USB

Getting both Touchpad and external USB mouse to work on the console is no biggy: just run gpm with the parameters -m /dev/psaux -t ps2 -M -m /dev/input/mice -t imps2 and voila. But getting XFree86 to work at the same time is something that I haven't tried further, I simply disable gpm in runlevel 5...

The following XF86Config excerpt works for me:

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver      "mouse"
  Identifier  "Mouse[0]"
  Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "off"
  Option      "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
  Option      "Buttons" "7"
  Option      "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver      "mouse"
  Identifier  "Mouse[1]"
  Option      "Device" "/dev/psaux"
  Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "on"
  Option      "Protocol" "ps/2"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
  [...]
  InputDevice "Mouse[0]" "CorePointer"
  InputDevice "Mouse[1]" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

I also use the common xmodmap trick to map the thumb buttons to buttons 6 and 7 and the scroll wheel to buttons 4 5, since otherwise scrolling won't work in most applications (note that for me to get xmodmap to work, I had to make the Intellimouse the CorePointer). I chose a system-wide approach and placed the following in /usr/X11/lib/X11/Xmodmap:

pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5

I didn't get newer imwheel versions to work yet -- it's required to map buttons 6 and 7 to the Back / Forward functionality in Mozilla, for instance.

This page last changed:
November 29, 2004