SuSE Linux 7.1
This page is now out of date and no longer maintained. I keep it here purely for reference purposes.
If you want more information about repairing laptops, or Linux on laptops try TuxMobil or Repair4Laptop.
Installing SuSE 7.1 on the B2154 was much easier than its predecessor. As I said in the introduction Linux as an operating system has matured very fast, and the differences between SuSE 6.1 and 7.1 were noteable.
Installation
Before you start see the section on suspend-to-disk.
Also SuSE 7.1 cannot detect how much available RAM memory the B2154 has, the SuSE book (and last time I checked the website) has a fixit guide at the back under Boot Options which tells you how to feed the correct memory size to SuSE from the installation boot screen.
As with the previous version I used installation by PCMCIA CDROM isn't possible, see the PCMCIA section below for more information on my installation.
Following that Yast 2 installation will run without a hitch (as long as you follow SuSE's instructions), the only items not picked up are listed below.
PCMCIA
Yet again (see my 6.1 page) the PCMCIA utilities on the installation floppy will not work. Installation is again available by Parallel Port CDROM, although the network card can be run from the installation floppies, hence I managed an NFS install off another Linux PC with CDROM drive (setting up NFS networking is beyond this guide).
Post install I added the latest copy of PCMCIA card services. This was a little problematic as the Kernel version with SuSE 7.1 had the card drivers included. Follow the SuSE guide for using the non-kernel PCMCIA drivers, and then install the new PCMCIA card services. See my 6.1 guide for the download site.
Modem
As with the earlier versions of SuSE the internal modem is not auto-detected. The Lucent winmodems driver (ltmodem) will take care of this. More information is available from Linmodems.org, and from Christoph Hebeisens' ltmodem pages.
Touchscreen
The Touchscreen drivers for XFree 4 can be found at Conans Website (should the driver no longer be available I've a copy of V0.7.4 here and the instructions in PDF here). These are very easy to install, and come with a very funky calibration tool. If you have problems configuring it here are the touchscreen sections from my XF86Config file (taken from my SuSE 8.1 installation guide):
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Hibernate
To allow your machine to suspend-to-disk you need to use the package lphdisk. This will prepare a partition on your hard disk for the APM function, note; the version that comes with SuSE 7.1 can only cope with primary partition number 4 (/dev/hda4) on the main hard disk as a hibernation partition, but. This partition should be created as you are installing linux, and its size is determined as:
physical ram + video memory + 2MB
So for example my B2154 has 192MB of ram, so my partition should be 261MB. This partition should be set to type A0, IBM Thinkpad Hibernation. Don't worry if you can't do this during installation, just set it as Linux and once your system is up change it using fdisk. After that just follow the lphdisk instructions (man lpdisk), and enable hibernate in the bios.
IRDA
The Infra-red port will work with SuSE 7.1 in the same way as it will with most other versions of SuSE; after a fashion. Only the standard serial interface is supported, which you should set up in the bios. In the sysconfig editor set the Infrared port (under the hardware settings) to /dev/ttyS1. This will allow use of the port under /dev/ircomm0 etc when Infrared is enabled (this is described in the SuSE book). Sadly there are more problems. If you use the PCMCIA slot or modem without IRDA first being activated the bios will switch off the IRDA port. To re-activate you must re-boot the computer. Also sometimes after the computer has been in hibernation the Infra-red port will not work until the machine has been rebooted.
Application Panel
The application panel software is still under development, I did once try the driver but failed to get it to work. Speaking personally I have never missed the panel.