• Contact: ScottRubin apreche@frontrowcrew.com

• Brand: Fujitsu
• Make : Lifebook
• Model: P7230

• Website: http://store.shopfujitsu.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildseriesbean.do?series=P7230

Current Issues

In Hardy Heron the audio works fine when using the built-in speakers, but it will not work for headphones. If you connect headphones to the laptop, the built-in speakers will mute themselves, but you will not hear anything in the headphones. You can enable the mixer option "Headphone as Line Out," and it will send an audio signal to the headphone jack. However, it will be a line-out signal not suitable for listening without an external amplifier. You can also add the line "options snd-hda-intel model=3stack" to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base, and restart the machine. The headphone jack will now work, but the built-in speakers will not.

WARNING: Be aware that with Feisty or Gutsy you may encounter bug #59695. I am 90% sure that this bug killed the Toshiba drive in my P7230. I replaced that drive with a 16 gigabyte Samsung solid state drive. The solid state drive works perfectly. I highly recommend it if you are willing to pay for it. It will result in quite a bit of extra battery life and performance.

I can't tell if the fingerprint scanner is working or not because I do not know what software to install to access it. I searched in synaptic and found no biometric software. Also, in Windows the fingerprint reader is used as a vertical scrolling device. It is positioned on this laptop between the two touchpad buttons just for this purpose. It would be very nice if the fingerprint reader could be used as a vertical scroll input under Linux.

The laptop has accelerometers in it that are used to detect shocking movements and unseat the heads on the hard drive in the case that it is dropped. There is no way for me to tell if this is working or not. It would be nice if it worked because it could theoretically prolong disk life. It would also be nice to access the accelerometer data for other fun functionality, such as tapping the screen to change desktops.

Next to the power button there are two buttons labeled "A" and "ECO". In Windows, by default, "A" launches an arbitrary application and "ECO" puts the laptop into power-saving economy mode. Although, the function of both of these buttons is completely customizable in Windows. In Linux, neither of these buttons seems to produce any sort of signal whatsoever. xev does not receive any events from them, and nothing shows up in any log or dmesg when they are pressed. I think they might be sending signals on the i2c bus.

In Windows the ECO button allows a feature where it can enable/disable the optical drive, wireless and other peripherals to save power. There is no way to do this under Linux, even if the ECO button were functioning.

The built in memory card reader seems to work with a few SD cards. However, with most SD cards it produces I/O errors, and it claims to be unable to read the partition table. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=403634. I reinstalled Vista on the laptop to just make sure. The SD reader functions perfectly in Vista with all cards. There is definitely a problem with the way Linux handles this particular SD reader. Here is the info on the reader from lspci.

08:03.2 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17)
08:03.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 08)
08:03.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 03)

Some models of this laptop have a built-in webcam (046d:09b2 Logitech, Inc). While the webcam capture images nicely, the image is reversed ("upside/down")... and the driver has currently (20080511) not action possible to flip/flap back the image: see Bug.

On system startup there is a message about BIOS Bug #81. This seems to have no noticeable effect on system functionality.

Suspending and hibernating work almost perfectly in Hardy Heron. However, when returning from hibernate or suspend you could have a dialog box that looks like it comes from xSANE about some devices not being detected, or some strange sounds - Anyway, the resume is ok. Very strange.

System Info

bios-version:Version 1.04
system-manufacturer:FUJITSU
system-product-name:LifeBook P7230

Hardware details

Notes

CategoryLaptop