Lifebook U810 and OpenSuse 11.2

OK, heartened by my OpenSuse 11.2 experience on the NB100 - where pretty much everything worked out of the box (webcam, hibernation, most of special keys), I thought it was time to try it on the U810.

The install went OK, didn't need the acpi/pnp boot hacks to get wired ethernet working, the ath5K drivers worked reasonably well (if still a bit slow). Startup and shutdown were snappier than before and the KDE 4.3 3D desktop effects work fast enough (and are better integrated than compiz+KDE 3).

However, there are a couple of show stoppers:

• Suspend and hibernate crash hard (power cycle hard) when there are SD/CF cards inserted. This appears (after a bit of digging) to be the eject action during shutdown. The only fix is to not do this which makes me uneasy about filesystem integrity and breaks automatic remounting on awakening.
• Webcam driver has been dropped as a separate driver pending inclusion in the uvcvideo core drivers - unfortunately this doesn't work yet.

Fair enough - back to OpenSuse 11.0 but I miss KDE 4.3. The version of KDE 4 that came with 11.0 was the .0 or .1 release which was frankly slow and nasty - so I have been using KDE 3+compiz. Upgrading KDE was not altogether trivial...

Toshiba NB100

I've just acquired a Toshiba NB100 - it was cheap. OpenSuse 11.2 went on quite easily and seems to work quite well though I have not tested it thoroughly yet. I took the plunge with KDE 4.4 and it seems to be quite nice now - the whole things starts up quickly and 3D effects work well (better integrated than KDE 3.5 + Compiz) though wobbly windows aren't quite as nifty as compiz. I find the desktop plane/expo features invaluable working on a small screen.

Good Points:

Upgradable to 2GB RAM
Network and VGA ports on the back of the unit
Opens flat
Dismantled it to put in a bigger HDD - it seems well built
- Big plate dissipates heat across the back of the keyboard keeping it cool and thus quiet
Three full size USB ports

Not so good points:

Case has to be opened to get at anything other than the RAM - and it's a fairly major operation
...in particular, swapping hard drives is a big dismantling job
No obvious spare ports/pads inside for easy modding
Battery sticks out at the back - but that does stop it tipping when the screen's right back

MSI K8N Master2

Are there any 2GB DIMMS that work in all 6 slots of the MSI K8N Master2?

The spec says it supports up to 12GB of RAM but all the QVL docs only rate it for 4 2GB DIMMS. I can put in 6 (decent, HP server pulls) and it counts up to 12Gb but keels over when it tries to boot. Clocking down to DDR 333 or even 266 makes no difference. All the DIMMS memtest86 fine in other motherbords.

I suspect the DIMM VRM's don't have the grunt to power a full complement of 2GB sticks.

Opteron BIOS Support

My home servers are primarily Opteron 2XX-based.

It seems that support for the OEM Opterons (OSP2xx, OST2xx) in BIOSes is somewhat patchy. Based on the boards I've seen Tyan and MSI don't support them in their public BIOSes (Tiger K8WE, K8N Master2, K8T Master2) but SuperMicro does (H8DAE). These CPU's will work but the ACPI P-States aren't published by the BIOS so Cool'n'Quiet/Powernow doesn't work. The SuperMicro will even take two Opterons with different power profiles - say an OSP275 and an OSA275 and correctly handle their different P-state voltages.

Since these CPU's are turning up cheaply on eBay this is worth remembering. I have a couple of OSP's in my Iwill DK8N since it doesn't do Cool'n'Quiet so the reduced 68W power envelope matters.

BTW If your K8N Master2 conks out when you enable Cool'n'Quiet you need to do this mod.