Taming the T5

I've managed to mostly make it work. This is a summary of details which may be helpful if you decide this is the laptop for you.

Current State

Installation Notes

1. I tweaked the bios boot order so it boots off a USB CDROM before the hard drive. The install took place via a USB DVD drive.
2. I did a standard install of fedora core 5. There are a few GB of unallocated free space beyond cylinder 6903. I did not touch it while repartitioning the main NTFS drive on the theory that it was a windows restoration partition.
3. After the install, I setup the network and used the direction here to setup yum repositories, then I executed 'yum -y update' and rebooted.
4. Initial testing showed that (a) APM did not work (except for allowing brightness adjustments) and (b) ACPI did not work. I upgraded to kernel 2.6.18-rc4 with the latest ACPI patch. When upgrading, it is important that you make sure the pcmcia subsystem is compiled as a module.
5. The kernel boot parameter acpi_sleep=s3_bios fixed resume. It also enabled a workaround allowing the use of an external diplay.
6. It is important to remove pcmcia and the snd_hda_intel modules before suspend and reload them. This script (which I placed in /etc/acpi/actions) automates the process. In addition, this file in /etc/acpi/events executes suspend-to-RAM whenever the lid closes.
7. I recommend duplicating your kernel source tree for safety before trying to get wireless working. When compiling the alternative ieee implementation for the wireless, you will need to disable ipw2200, ipw2100, and hostap in the wireless network devices in order for the kernel make to allow disabling of it's internal 802.11. Later, when making the wireless, it will complain about symbol mismatch. It's important that you accept the symbol mismatch because running 'make patch_kernel' with the ieee80211 code will result in an uncompilable kernel.
8. For LCD brightness control, I tried to get Panasonic Hotkeys working, but gave up due to multiple dependency failures. The kernel module relies on 'acpi_os_free' which no longer exists, and the hotkeys code relies on Berkeley db3 while fedora core 5 has db4. In addition there were include failures. I also tried Luming Yu's acpi hotkey support, but failed due to linux kernel version skew. In both of these cases, a more dedicated attempt might have been succesful, and I'd be happy to hear if anyone else succeeds.
9. I ended up using the free space at the end of the hard drive as the hibernating swap partition.
10. To engage CPU scaling, modprobe cpufreq_conservative. It's also possible to CPU throttle (hard limit the fraction of time the CPU is on) using 'echo n > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling' where n is in {0,7], but this must be done by hand.
11. You might fool about with 'hdparm -B 1 /dev/hda' and 'hdparm -S 60 /dev/hda'.

Detailed system information

Related Info

Is this a good laptop?

1. Write in Japanese or able to touch type. Most keys are ok, but the the shift symbols are often mistaken with respect to a standard US keyboard layout.
2. No need for a CDROM.

If anyone knows more about how to remove the disadvantages, please email jl@hunch.net.