Fedora Linux on the Sharp M4000 notebook

This page contains some brief notes about my experiences getting Fedora 8 Linux working on my Sharp M4000 laptop. A previous page about Fedora 6 on this machine is here.

Here is a brief summary of what's working on this machine. (Basically everything is, except that I haven't tried the modem.)

Feature	Under Linux	Notes
Widescreen 1280×800 display	Works	No special action needed
Accelerated graphics	Works	No special action needed
3D effects (Compiz)	Mostly works	Works fine under Gnome, but is unreliable under KDE
Sound	Works	No special action needed
DVD-ROM/CD writer	Works	Kernel parameters: "ide0=noprobe ide1=noprobe"
Touchpad	Works	No special action needed
Suspend to RAM	Works	No special action needed
Suspend to disk	Works	No special action needed
CPU speed scaling	Works	No special action needed
Ethernet	Works	No special action needed
Wireless	Works	No special action needed
External monitor/projector	Works	Requires editing of one configuration file
Modem	Untested	Never tried it, so I don't know whether it works

Basically Fedora runs pretty nicely on this machine. A few small tricks are needed as described here. Complete installation should take you about an hour.

Screenshot of Fedora on my M4000 laptop. (The open window contains an instance of Windows 2000, running within Linux under QEMU.)

As usual, these notes are merely a document of things that worked for me. There's no guarantee they will work for you, and there are some things you could do while installing Linux that would really mess up your computer bad. I'm not aware of anything that will do that other than flashing your BIOS, which I don't recommend, but hey, you never know. You have been warned. All opinions expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily shared by the University of Michigan.

Installation

The machine came with Windows XP Professional. I wanted to keep that, so I resized the Windows partition, as described in many other places. There are many tools you can use for this (parted, gparted, qtparted, Partition Magic). I used the free GParted Live, which did the job fine.

Windows came in a 60GB NTFS partition, which I resized to 15GB. There was another empty 10GB NTFS partition, which I deleted. Also there was a 5GB FAT partition. This partition contains an entire spare copy of Windows XP, in case you need to reinstall Windows. (Sharp provides this instead of a Windows CD.) The standard boot loader on the computer can reinstall Windows for you from this partition. (I think you hit F10.) However, installing Linux overwrites the standard boot loader with the Linux boot loader, which means you will no longer be able to reinstall Windows this way after you have installed Linux. To get around this, you can make a Windows recovery disk (actually four CDs), which as far as I know contains a complete copy of what's in the utility partition, and allows you to reinstall Windows at any later time. To create a recovery disk, get four blank CDs, boot Windows, and then follow the instructions contained in the computer manual. Once you create a recovery disk the reinstall-Windows-from-hard-disk-partition option is disabled anyway, so you might as well delete the utility partition, which is what I did, or you can reinstall Windows from the recovery disk, which deletes the partition for you.

This left me with 65GB of free space for Linux.

I did a network install using the basic boot CD, but installing from DVD should be very similar. I had to change the boot order in the BIOS to get the machine to boot from the CD drive – hit F2 as the computer is booting and use common sense. Then stick the disk in the drive and fire it up.

For some reason the Fedora 8 installer hangs on this computer, but there is a simple fix: edit the boot options on first start-up and add the options floppy.allowed_drive_mask=0 clocksource=acpi_pm. I have no idea why this works – neither option sounds particularly promising – but various people found that this works on other computers and it does with this one too.

After that things proceed as normal. When you get to the part about partitioning the disk, you can accept the default partitioning or you may want to do a manual partitioning yourself, which is what I did. I made a 100MB /boot partition on /dev/sda2, a 1GB swap partition on /dev/sda3, and then an extended partition holding 10GB for / and the rest on /home.

The installer will also ask you about the boot loader. At this point click the advanced options box, and when you get the advanced options screen there's a box for general kernel options. Here you should type ide0=noprobe ide1=noprobe. Without this, the DVD-ROM drive doesn't work properly.

The rest of the installation is vanilla. When it's done installing it'll reboot and the first time it boots it will run through some setup stuff – creating a user account and so forth. After that you're done! Congratulations. You've installed Linux.

Tricks

Networking: The first thing you'll want to do after installing is get the network working properly. Both Ethernet and wireless work perfectly out of the box. I also very much like NetworkManager, which I think is turned on be default. If it's not you can turn it on under the "services" configuration option (under the "System" menu item in KDE – there's probably a similar menu item in Gnome). Once NetworkManager is running, you can either just plug in an Ethernet cable or select and join a wireless network chosen from the list that you get when you click the NetworkManager icon in the system tray. One hint that may save you some time: the wireless adaptor is off by default when you boot up the machine, so you'll see no wireless networks initially. You can switch it on by hitting Fn-F1 on the keyboard. (The light should come on on the front of the computer.) Then, after a short pause, networks will appear in the NetworkManager list.
Updates and yum: The yum updater program comes already configured to install software from the standard Fedora repositories. But it's useful to configure it also to search the Livna package repository, which contains a lot of good stuff not on Fedora. Just type
```
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
```
as root and you're good to go. (If you don't have a network connection, then you can't do this. On the other hand, if you don't have a network connection, then you can't use Livna at all. Or yum for that matter.)
Then you might want to update everything to the newest version. Type yum update and wait a couple of hours.
In addition I installed a bunch of other things that I consider useful, including xfig, gv, xdvik, inkscape, scribus, acroread, amarok, mpg321, mplayer-gui, xemacs, ddd, octave, fftw, blas, lapack, grace, labplot, flash-plugin, sshfs, xcdroast, and audacity. (Note that acroread and flash-plugin have to be downloaded direct from Adobe, which provides them in the form of convenient RPM files for direct install on Fedora. Just do a Google search and you'll find them.) I also removed totem, which is mostly worthless and causes some annoying problems for playing media files.
External monitors and projectors: If you want to use your laptop with an external CRT or other monitor or with a projector (sometimes called a "beamer" in Europe), then you'll find that – annoyingly – the Fn-F5 key combination that is supposed to switch between the built-in LCD panel and the external video doesn't work under Linux. Also, for some reason, the picture from the external video connection is skewed to the left a little way, which is a problem for some projectors. A fix for both these problems is to add a new section as follows to the X Windows configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
```
Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "Monitor0"
	VendorName   "Unknown Vendor"
	ModelName    "Generic Monitor"
	Option	     "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
	Option	     "Clone" "true"
EndSection
```
It can go after the "Device" section, for example. Then add the single line Monitor "Monitor0" to the "Screen" section in the same file. This fixes the problem with the image displacing to the left and also sets the external video connection to be on by default. If you later want to turn the external connection off for some reason, you can use the program i810switch, which allows you to turn it on and off with a simple command.
Touchpad: Touchpad works fine out of the box, but the horizontal scrolling thing really annoyed me – Firefox thinks you're pressing the "forward" and "back" buttons repeatedly and gets very confused. You can fix this by finding the "InputDevice" section for the synaptics device in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding the line Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0". I also found the mouse buttons too fussy about timing when I was clicking both to emulate the middle button, so I added Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "100" in the same place.
Fonts: As a KDE user I find it annoying that the fonts in the Firefox and Thunderbird menus are different from other programs, because they respond to Gnome settings, not KDE ones. There's a handy fix for this: a tool called gtk-qt-engine. To install it just type yum install gtk-qt-engine. After installation you'll find you have a new menu item in the KDE Control Center under Appearance & Themes/GTK Styles and Fonts. Select this and click the buttons for "Use my KDE style in GTK applications" and "Use my KDE fonts in GTK applications". Then Firefox and friends will look just like everything else, fonts and all. Or you can select your own style, fonts, and sizes if you prefer.
Suspend: Both suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-RAM work fine out of the box. Just right-click on the power meter icon in the tray and select the one you want. You can also suspend using the traditional Fn-F12 key combination. Also, if sound appears not to work after a resume, don't panic. Actually it's working just fine but for some reason the volume gets muted when you suspend and resume. To fix it, just pull up your favorite volume control (e.g., kmix) and unmute the volume. (You click on the little picture of an LED in kmix.) Then the sound will come back. I found I only needed to do this once after the initial install and thereafter it remembered the previous volume level itself.
3D effects: Compiz, which provides 3D effects for the desktop, works reasonably well on this machine, even though the machine doesn't have a fancy graphics card. Under Gnome all you have to do is enable it using the appropriate menu item. You might also want to install gnome-compiz-manager, which gives you some basic configuration options. Compiz also works under KDE, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a reliable way to make it start automatically upon login. The menu item that's supposed to turn it on does so when you first run it, but then when you log out and log in again something goes wrong and you don't get the effects back. If anyone knows a fix for this, please let me know.

That's about it. Overall, I really like this machine – it's very nice to use, has an excellent screen, it's fast, light, and well designed. I'd certainly recommend it if you're looking for a sleek and portable Linux machine.

Last modified: December 16, 2007

Mark Newman