Note: this is currently work in progress!
The Medion MD95300 notebook was sold in December 2004 by Aldi in Germany. It ships with an Intel Pentium M 735 (1.7 GHz) mobile processor (codename: Dothan B0, that's model 13, stepping 6), 512 MB RAM, 80 GB (~ 74 GiB) Hitachi hard disc and a Samsung LTN154X1 15,4" TFT Wide XGA display. The system name seems to be MiM 2030-MP, it looks very similar to a Mitac 8050MP-3003.
I couldn't boot from the first CD, so I choose the second one (Knoppix 3.7 boots fine, btw). I told YAST to use the complete hard disc (who needs Windoze anyway ...), but still YAST wants to resize one partition and create mountpoints to the Windows partitions. So, I switched to a console and used fdisk to remove the partitions. Installation went smoothly, and after Linux was installed I can even boot from the first SUSE 9.2 installation CD (probably Win XP was the culprit, I dunno). Actually, booting from hard disc failed, as the boot flag for /dev/hda1 was missing. So, I set it via fdisk and since then booting into the installed SUSE 9.2 system works nicely. As file system I've choosen XFS, just to get some experience with this file system.
The ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10] is supported by the X11 server of X.org via the "radeon" driver. Of course, without 3D acceleration, but I don't need it. Actually, I was lame and used SaX to do all the X11 configuration for me :-) Closed-source drivers from ATI are also available. SUSE offers RPMs. A Debian page and a Gentoo ATI FAQ have been quite helpfull for me. The ATI driver works for me (the FPS are much better), but there might be some issue with suspend-to-disk (at least accoring to an SUSE bugzilla entry). Actually, the system hangs when it wakes up from system-to-disk and "restarts" X. There might be a solution for this, but I haven't digged into it and I switched back to use the "radeon" driver (see ATI's Infobase wrt this issue).
The Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless 2200BG was supported out of the box by ipw2200. The WLAN functionality can be switched on or off via Fn+F1 keys. Works for me very stable, no issues so far. WEP encryption also works. I use a rather ancient version, 0.8, as shipped with SUSE 9.2 - probably I should try 0.19.
Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller works as well via ALSA. The keys for in/decreasing volume via Fn+F3/Fn+F4 don't work.
The integrated WinModem Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller works as well via the SmartLink Modem driver. The smartlink-softmodem package ships with an buggy init script (/etc/init.d/slmodemd), as the required "slamr" module is not loaded. A bug fixed version is available via YOU (if the modem is your only conenction to the Internet, simply do a "modprobe slamr" and "/etc/init.d/slmodemd start" as root).
Seems to work quite smoothly. I can check the battery information, suspend
to disk works, the CPU freq is changed dynamically. If the TFT panel is
closed, the notebook suspends to disk, if I press the power on switch, Linux
is shut down and the notebook is switched off. Retrieving thermal information
is not possible, though. Suspend to RAM does not work, wake up fails, the
notebook seems to hang. Configuring Fn+F12 (save power) works, e.g. suspend
to disk or enabling the screensaver.
Note: Actually, only CPUFreq is working which is able to switch
between 1700 MHz and 600 MHz. speedstep-centrino is not working, which
is able to switch between more CPU frequencies. speedstep-centrino expects
the model name like "Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1700MHz", but
checking /proc/cpuinfo it's being displayed as "Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.70GHz". So, speedstep-centrino expects MHz, not GHz - that's why
the processor is not being recognized. Looking at the code, it seems only
the "old" Pentium M (model 9), with 1 MB Level 2 cache, is supported,
but not the new one (model 13), code-name "Dothan" with 2 MB Level 2 cache.
Dothan support as been discussed several times on L-K, but as for this
processor four voltages per freqcuency is defined, it's not so easy to
find out which voltage is the correct one. See also Stefan's
note about
patching the kernel for Dothan support for his Acer Travelmate 292.
Note: Well, the ACPI table(s) seems to be very rudimentarily as
you can see on this decompiled version of
/proc/acpi/dsdt using an ACPI (de)compiler from Intel.
Setting acpi_os_name to "Microsoft Windows NT" (or XP) as kernel
parameter doesn't help either to fix the speedstep issue mentioned
above. Digging into the ACPI
specs, the complete _PSS and _TSS section is missing in the DSDT.
The _TSS specifies the Throttling Supported States, _PSS specifies the
Performance Support States.
It's being detected as Medion 7134, which seems to be manufacutred by Creatix Polymedia GmbH based on Philips Semiconductors SAA7134 chip. The tuner seems to be Philips PAL/SECAM multi (FM1216ME MK3). Currently, I'm not able to retrieve any channels from the card, so I can't watch TV yet. kdetv and xawtv once in a while hung up the system completely.
All the other stuff I haven't checked, but the most critical components for me simply work. For some more details about the hardware, please see the lspci output and the hwinfo --short output.
Contact: Rainer Link (link at unfug dot org)
License: GNU Public License (GPL)
Last modification: 2005-05-19, 22:00 GMT
