This page is here to give you a hand in getting SuSE
8.0 (on later versions for sure) to run on your Medion MD5400. The
laptop was sold in October 2002 at ALDI Nord (Germany).
I have basically submitted here my notes that I made in getting this
to work. It is shown how to get X, the sound card and the CD drive running
and be able to mount the XP partitions. I add a note about
the power management at the end.
I am in no way
affiliated to Medion or any other vendor. The information is naturally
provided with no warranty and no guarantee of success ... you use the
information at your own risk, but it did work for me!
Getting it to work
- Partitions: Be very careful: SuSE
cannot change the XP partitions because they are some proprietory
format. As far as I know you will have to use commercial software if
you want to make them smaller and use XP and SuSE at the same time. If
you just want to see how Linux works, you can use the small rescue
partition at the end of the drive and rearrange it into /, /home and
swap partitions (or whatever your plans are). Otherwise, you have to
rearrange, or perhaps give up D: .
- Installation: Do the normal install,
but do not switch on X (we want only text mode right
now) and switch off the sound card support for now: Both the graphics
card and the sound card hang the system when rebooting later if you
don't switch them off here. I show you below how to fix this.
- X configuration: Although SuSE identifies the
graphics card correctly, I couldn't get the graphics card driver to
work under 8.0 (perhaps SuSE 8.1 can since the Nvidia card is quite
well known). Therefore, I used this
link to install the frame buffer device. The frame buffer device
offers a default graphics support that does not require a specific
driver, but it doesn't support the specialities of the card (3D
acceleration etc).
- Display Manager: Now you have configured X with
SaX2 and the xdm login manager is starting up when rebooting or going
into runlevel 5. In order to get kdm (which is nicer and gives you the
chance to reboot and shut down with mouse clicks), become root and
enter "kdm" in the top field in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager . I
personally would do this in console mode (type CTRL-ALT-F1). Shutting
X down (init 3) and up again (init 5) restarts X. [I had to do this
twice, X will come up on the screen you get to by typing CTRL-ALT-F7].
- Sound: There is a sound system bug in SuSE 8.0
which is documented here.
I just uninstalled k_smp and installed k_deflt in YAST2. Afterwards I
configured the sound card in YAST2 with no further problems.
- CD-ROM: At this
address instructions are given to get an IDE writer running. If
you apply the same steps to the CD-ROM, you will be able to mount it
properly. For me, it was originally seen at /dev/hdc and now works at
/dev/scd0.
- Mounting XP partitions: Become root and create
directory /xpc (or whatever you'd like it to be called). Then
enter
/dev/hda1 /ntc ntfs ro,noauto,user,umask=022 0 0
into your /etc/fstab file, where /dev/hda1 is the partition you wish
to mount. (I found this at this
address and it works fine). Brief explanation: "ro" is read-only,
it is dangerous to write to XP partitions (the file system is called
ntfs), so never do. "user" allows everyone to mount, "umask=022"
allows everyone to see the mounted partitions. These people
develop the software.
- Power Management: There may be an issue with the power management (fan doesn't switch off etc),
I found
this link
on the SuSE mailing list.
All the best,
Robert Schmidt