Installing SuSE 9.1 on a Panasonic Let's Note CF-A44

The Panasonic Let's Note CF-A44 is a laptop computer which, to the best of my knowledge, was only ever released in Japan. At that time, Panasonic did not distribute laptops world-wide. My brother purchased the CF-A44 in Japan, and subsequently gave the laptop to me. The CF-A44 looks quite similar to a Let's Note CF-M1ER and has similar specifications, although the CF-M1ER is more powerful. Doug Bagley has published his installation notes.

My Panasonic CF-A44 features...

• Mobile Pentium MMX 266 MHz
• IDE-33 7.6 gigabyte hard-drive.
• 11.3 inch diagonal TFT screen
• MagicMedia 256AV providing video and sound
• 64 MB internal memory, and a RAM expansion slot. My CF-A44 came with a 64 MB SO-DIMM (144 pin). I replaced it with a 128 MB SO-DIMM (PC133), which works well. When I first accessed the BIOS setup screen, after inserting the 128 MB SO-DIMM, the BIOS offered me some choices (in Japanese). I chose the first option, whatever that was, and everything seems to work fine. However, when my brother first installed the 64 MB SO-DIMM, his BIOS settings were incorrect and needed to be fixed.
• Internal CD-ROM (UJDA130)
• PCMCIA slot. Has a 32-bit Ricoh RL5C475 CardBus controller. However, there is some suspicion that the CF-A44 will only accept the 16-bit PCMCIA cards, not the 32-bit Cardbus cards.
• USB 1.0 socket
• Japanese keyboard layout. It is QWERTY, but many punctuation keys are not in the same place as on a US keyboard. In fact, the layout resembles what typewriter keyboards USED to look like in Australia before we all started using IBM keyboards with the US layout. Some special keys with Japanese words and a lot of extra Japanese symbols are available...
• Japanese BIOS. Probably no English version is available.
• Touchpad (properly identified and used by SuSE 9.1)
• 56K WinModem (identified by SuSE 9.1, but I have not tested it)
• IrDA (I don't know if SuSE can either identify or use the IrDA)
• Floppy disk controller, interface slot. My brother forgot to give me those bits and pieces...