Fujitsu Lifebook B series 'Biblo'

About this machine

The first model of this machine, the B110 was released in December 1998 here in the UK. It is a very small laptop with an 8.4 inch 800x600 TFT LCD, a similar size to many WinCE sub notebooks, but it is a real machine: Intel Pentium 233 (not a Pentium II), 3.2GB hard drive. By default it comes with 32MB RAM and a free slot for 32/64/128; I have added a 64MB RAM chip here. It weighs about 1.1kg. Battery life is about 3 hours, depending what you are doing; you can carry an extra battery too of course.

Specs:

• Pentium 233 MMX (B110, B112), Celeron 300 (B142)
• 3.2GB hard drive (larger on later models)
• 32MB RAM upgradeable to 160MB
• IR port
• 2 USB ports
• PS/2 mouse + keyboard port (single port, double head cable)
• built in speakers
• microphone input, headphone output
• volume control
• Kensington lock connector
• Later models apparently have support for a serial port adaptor off the main unit not the expansion box.
• expansion unit (for legacy ports)
  • serial port
  • parallel port
  • monitor output
  • floppy disk connector, drive included.

Other models

• B112 is the same as the B110 but with a touchscreen
• B142 300MHz mobile Celeron, with touchscreen
• B2130 400MHz mobile Celeron, larger screen (same resolution however), integrated modem and ethernet.

The B112 is pretty much identical to the B110, but with a touchscreen. Bas van den Heuvel has installed Linux on the B112 with no problems, although he states that the touch screen doesn't respond very well (see below). The B142 has a 300MHz mobile Celeron, and the touch screen. Both can apparently drive an external monitor at 1024x768, which the B110 cannot, being limited to the same as the LCD. Both work under Linux. I have also had a query about the B145, but no details about it yet: this model has the touch screen and the modem apparently. All US and Japanese models, but not European models (except B2130) havean integrated modem (a winmodem, so probably useless) with GSM support. The B2130 has a 10.4 inch screen, and is a little heavier (1.4kg).

There are different models out in Japan, the Biblo MC30, which has a touch screen and is made of magnesium alloy, with 64MB RAM as standard, and a larger hard drive. Like the B110, it has USB on the main machine, not on the docking station as earlier ones had apparently. Otherwise it looks very similar. It appears in fact that JPD sell direct in the UK, US and other countries (and even offer a discount if you don't want Windows installed, and this model is $2699, ie substantially more expensive than the B110 at UKP 999+VAT. It is unclear how Linux compatible this machine is, but I guess it is very similar to the B142.

The FMV Biblo is out in Japan, with a 1024x768 screen (I think). This appears to be supported by Linux according to the Neomagic drivers page.

Sorry this picture is not very good... it is running KDE with some xemacs windows.

Installing and running Linux

Installing Linux turned out to be relatively simple. I put in a RedHat 5.2 boot disk, selected the use pcmcia option, and did an ftp install using an ethernet card from out local Redhat mirror. This took about 10 minutes. I didn't get a CD-ROM with the machine (there is a PCMCIA one available), or I could have used this, but either way you need an installer with PCMCIA support (eg RedHat 5.2, not 5.1). The machine is supplied with a 1.2GB empty partition which is what I used initially, later resizing using Partition Magic.

I have recently upgraded to RedHat 6.0, with no problems. If you start with RedHat 6 or a similar new release you should have no problems at all, as pretty much everything is supported out of the box.

Detailed hardware notes:

• X windows: Screen in X looked terrible initially. Despite having selected 800x600 LCD, the machine was it turned out trying to emulate 640x480. Using Xconfigurator this was fixed: this /etc/X11/XF86Config file will work fine. Also sets colour depth to 16 bit, rather than the default 8. You can use 24 bit, but the image is the same and it is much slower (and Netscape icons dont come out in colour). The graphics chip on the B110 is a MagicGraph NM2160 with 2MB RAM.
• APM: Initially if power management was turned on in the BIOS, the machine would not wake up after sleeping. This was because APM was not compiled into the kernel. I built a new 2.2.1 kernel with it enabled, and it is fine (it takes a couple of seconds to wake up after the screen comes back). RedHat 6.0 and later kernels have APM enabled by default, so recompiling should no longer be necessary. The save to disk feature also works: press FN and the sleep button and it saves a memory image which it restores on next boot, in about 10s for 96MB. This is extremely useful: I hardly ever shut the machine down; you can also set it in the BIOS to automatically save to disk after sleeping for an hour. Having replaced the disk, and exhaustively messed things up I can now report most of the details (note this applied to all Phoenix NoteBios 4.0 machines). You can either have the save to disk partition in the file save2dsk.bin in a FAT partition that is marked as bootable (use the a command in fdisk to set this if necessary, or an a partition of type a0 (IBM Thinkpad hibernate), which must be a primary partition before cylinder 1024 of your disk. The phdisk DOS program supplied can create either of these, but note that it just creates the partition at the end of your disk (or before cylinder 1024) overwriting anything that is there (the file goes in the DOS C: drive). You can create these yourself but they will not be recognised unless they are formatted. You can copy your old file and dd it back into a file or partition, or use a blank 96MB one from me; I will try to find out what the format is and write a Linux version of phdisk. Note that recent versions of apmd seem to cause problems with shutting down - will find out why.
• Sound. This is fine under 2.0.x kernels, but it does not work on early 2.2 series kernels. 2.2.5 and above are fine however. This is using the standard OSS drivers: I have not yet tested ALSA. Sound quality is very good through the headphones (the speakers are ok, but don't have much bass). I have not yet tested recording, as I have no microphone, but there is no reason why it should not work: will test this soon. The chip is a soundblaster compatible (dmesg says SB 3.01 detected OK (220) ESS chip ES1879 detected).
• apmd. This works, but does not give much information: does not give the charge rate for example, only estimated charge and running time.
• Console is only 640x480 and sits in the middle of the screen. Having updated the kernel to 2.2.5 I installed the framebuffer device and now have a proper 800x600 console (with penguin at boot time, very nice). This worked with absolutely no problems. I believe that this should become the default in 2.2 based distributions at some time, otherwise you will have to install it yourself (not difficult): install the fbset package to create the framebuffer devices, and add vga=0x314 to the top of the lilo.conf file, rerun lilo and reboot. There is a BIOS option (or press FN F5) to switch to interpolating 640x480, but it doesn't look very nice compared to the large console.
• External display. This can be turned on or off in the BIOS. It appears to be 800x600 only on the B110 (newer models can do 1024x768 externally apparently, will get modelines shortly). There is some flexibility in sync rates if you turn the LCD off. I will try to make an XF86Config file for these. You should be able to uncomment the lines with # intern_disp and # extern_disp in the XF86Config file to set internal or external display (not yet tested). APPARENTLY NOT TRUE: can do 1024x768 on B110: will test this.
• Infra red. This works fine. Just turn on the second serial port in the BIOS, and the IR port will be at /dev/ttyS3, appearing as a standard 16550A serial port. See also this page at the Linux IrDA project. The BIOS claims that the machine supports FIR (fast infra red, up to 4Mb/s) but I have not yet managed to identify the chipset and hence whether this is supported.
• USB: the machine uses the UHCI USB chips, and works with the uhci kernel module. USB on 2.2 kernels can be a bit flaky, should be much better on 2.4.
• Touch screen on B112 and B142. Update Harald Hoyer has now written a driver for the touch screen, based on the XFree86 and GPM drivers, so this is properly supported. See his page of instructions to get the code. More good work supported by RedHat.
• Internal modem in US and Japanese models: this is a winmodem, but there is now a driver. Use the ltmodem.o module from this page. ATI identifies it as LT V.90 Data+FAX Modem version 5.68. Thanks to Stefan Weber for this.
• Hard drive: this is reported as (on the B110): FUJITSU MHD2032AT, 3102MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=788/128/63, UDMA. The more recent models have larger drives. This is a 9.5mm model; I will shortly try replacing mine. Please let me know if you open up your machine (also look at what IR chipset it uses).
• PCMCIA: there is a single type II PCMCIA slot (not type III). This works fine. Apparently there is a CardBus adaptor for more recent models. I use a Xircom ethernet and modem card here, as with one slot, combined ethernet and modem is useful. This card is very satisfactory, although there are the following caveats: 100Mb ethernet does not perform noticeably better than 10Mb with the current driver (I am not entirely sure what the maximum bandwidth of the PCMCIA interface is, but it is probably not very high anyway). The second problem is that Windows 98 does not recognise the ethernet part of the card, only the mode, even with the supplied driver. I might be able to update the driver more easily if the ethernet wasn't the main interface to the web, and if I had a CD drive (although the standard Fujitsu one is a PCMCIA device, which makes plug and play on a PCMCIA card difficult with only one port). This is not however a major problem, as Linux works and I have not booted into Windows for a long time.
• Memory: these machines use the Intel TX motherboards which will only cache 64MB RAM. It is the case that if you use more it will slow your machine down! However in 2.4 kernels there is a RAM block device that lets you use this memory as very fast swap space, which basically solves the problem. To set this up, set LILO up with append="mem=64M", add the line options slram start=67108864 length=33554432 (for 32MB RAM over 64MB, adjust length as appropriate) to /etc/modules.conf, then add modprobe mtdcore; modprobe mtdblock; modprobe slram; mkswap /dev/mtdblock/0 to /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit before the swapon line (note this is for devfs, otherwise make the block device as /dev/mtdblock0, and add this as a swap partition with a high priority in /etc/fstab.

Lupe Christoph has installed SuSe on the Fujitsu too. He used a PCMCIA CD-ROM and SuSe 6.0.

Andrew Chadwick has installed Debian, a task not for the faint of heart with current Debian releases, as the default kernels do not work and you cannot install from a PCMCIA device.

Brian Schau maintains a page about how to install Linux on a B110 without a network card or CD-ROM, using PLIP (parallel port) and the Stampede Linux distribution.

Other links

Linux laptop page.

There are a few reviews: a short one of the B112 from BuyCAD.com, one from Mobile Computing.

Carry cases

Being an unusual size, these are not so easy to find. There is a carry case available from The Pouch. I use one from Silicon Sports, although I am not sure it is still available.

Hanno Mueller writes:

Eagle Creek sells a near-to-perfect bag for the Biblo, the "Excursion Bag", Item # 40057. It features a shoulder strap and a waist belt.

It carries the Biblo without the port replicator and has a front pouch ideal for the ac converter and some hardware (I store my USB mouse and a PCMCIA network card in there). The main pouch is padded enough to protect the laptop, though I doubt that it's enough to protect against a high drop. At least, I wouldn't want to try.

There's one major disadvantage - the main pouch has almost the exact size of the laptop and so the pouch's zipper can touch the case, thus the zipper may cause scratches. Right now, I am helping myself with a little plastic bag for the Biblo, but that looks a little strange. I'll see if I can find a different solution.

Here in Germany, Eagle Creek bags are sold in shops for outdoor equipment, I bought it at Globetrotter in Hamburg for 80 DM (about 40 US-$). I also got the little plastic bag there, originally made for tent equipment.