Taming the T5

The panasonic T5 is a japanese exotic laptop with an absurd (15 hours claimed) battery life weighing 2.8 lbs. Does Linux work on this laptop? The answer is "yes".

These are my notes from installing Fedora Core 8, for which most things now work out of the box compared to the Fedora Core 5 Install. Also note Neal's Fedora Core 6 notes. This is a summary of details which may be helpful if you decide this is the laptop for you.

Current State

Devices	Status	Notes
2 USB 2.0 ports	Working	Installation via USB DVD
Speaker	Workaround	Intel 82810G. The snd_hda_intel module should work, but it only outputs to the headphone jack.
Microphone	??	Untested
Video	Working	"Intel Corporation Mobile Integrated Graphics Controller". Uses intel driver.
VGA output	Working	I setup internal_display, external_display, and mirror scripts which use xrandr underneath.
PCMCIA	Working
Ethernet	Working	RTL-8139
Modem	??	Unable to test.
802.11	Working	Working with iwl3945.
Bluetooth	??	Unable to test.
SD card	??	Unable to test.
Suspend to RAM	Working	Very Fast: About 7 seconds to suspend and 3 seconds to recover.
Suspend to Disk	Working.	About 50 seconds to shutdown and 50 seconds to startup.
LCD Brightness control	Working	Install pcc-acpi-0.9 with this patch and use the brighten and darken scripts.
Hot buttons (Fn+F[1-10])	Not working	But functionality available via workarounds.

Installation Notes

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.
I did a standard install of fedora core 8. 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, and then later converted it to a swap partition.
After the install, I setup the network and used the direction here to setup yum repositories, then I executed 'yum -y update' and rebooted.

Detailed system information

lspci -vv
modprobe.conf
xorg.conf

Related Info

Notes from Neil on a fedora core 6 install.
Linux on a Panasonic Y5

Ubuntu on a Panasonic Y5 Linux on a Panasonic R4
Linux on Panasonic laptops

Is this a good laptop?

For me the answer is "yes". There are certain drawbacks: it doesn't have a built in CD/DVD drive and maybe the keyboard would confuse a hunt-and-peck typist. Neither of these bother me, so the combination of great batter life, sturdy construction, built-in wireless and low weight is exceptional. If you want to install linux on this machine, you probably want to have access to an expert at the install time.

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