Panasonic Let's Note CF-R3

[Jan Moren]

I've just reinstalled Ubuntu and upgraded to Breezy on this machine and
I thought I'd do a writeup on it here as there are some wrinkles to be
aware of, and this way other users may find it. This very probably
applies to its sister machines CF-T3 and CF-W3 as well.

First, Breezy works a lot better than Hoary did, thanks to some sadly
unsung hero that took the time and effort to integrate the
panasonic-specific ACPI stuff into the distribution. No more need to
find and build kernel patches. Things _almost_ work out of the box.

Install: went without much of a problem. But do not select japanese
keyboard during installation even though that's what the machine has. If
you plan to use anything else than Japanese, select 105 key keyboard
instead; the Gnome keyboard configurator will become endlessly confused
otherwise, when you try to select a non-japanese keyboard layout.

Keyboard, for masochists: I want to use English, Swedish and Japanese,
on a Japanese keyboard, with a Swedish layout. Not trivial. Set keyboard
to generic 105 key (intl), and layout to Swedish in the keyboard
preferences. To use the Swedish layout, a couple of keys have to be
remapped at the xkb level (Swedish has a key to the left of 'z' with
'<>|' that is missing on Japanese keyboards). Go
to /etc/X11/xkb/keycodes. Open "xfree86", and change <LSGT> to "<LSGT> =
115;" near the beginning, and change <RALT> and comment out <LWIN> as
follows further down:

    <RALT> = 129;
    // Microsoft keyboard extra keys
    //<LWIN> = 115;

This has the effect of making the key to the right of the space bar work
as AltGr, and the left Win key becomes the missing <, > and | key.

To enable Japanese, go to http://ubuntulinux.jp/, add their repository
and install scim, scim-anthy, scim-gtk-immodule and scim-modules-socket.
Excellent work!

The special keys mostly work - you can change screen brightness, volume
and turn sound on and of out of the box. One wrinkle is that the
brightness control is rough; you can set it to bright or really dim with
nothing in between. This is solveable by going to /etc/acpi and edit the
file "panabright.sh" the second line reads "SPAN=32". This is the step
size. I changed it to "SPAN=4" which I find much better, with 6 levels
of brightness.

ACPI almost works out of the box. Suspend to disk seems to suspend, but
when you try to boot, it will read a bunch of pages and then halt with
some less than informative messages (it mentions the number of pages it
should/want to read, and says something about "resume=" should be set).
I haven't dug into this as I don't normally use suspend to disk anyway.

Suspend to ram will not work as-is, but the fix is really easy. go
to /etc/default. Edit the file acpi-support. Uncomment the line
"ACPI_SLEEP=true" right in the beginning. If you want, also set
"SAVE_VBE_STATE=false" - having it on doesn't seem to harm anything, but
generates some error messages. And that's it - it should work now.

If anyone has comments or other information I'd be happy to hear about
it.

-- 
Dr. Jan Morén (mr)              
Japan:  090-3622 8920           jan.moren at lucs.lu.se
Sweden: 031-360 7723            http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren