The Unofficial Medion MD 9374 Resource Page

Equipped with
600 MHz Intel Celeron CPU
64 MB RAM (Default, here 192 MB)
6 GB HD Fujitsu MHK2060AT (Default, here 40 GB Fujitsu HD)
Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-C2402
Silicon Motion Lynx3DM
1024x768 Flat Panel
SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio (AD Analog Devices) (Aaargh!)
2 PCMCIA Adapters
HSP Micromodem
Connections: 1x Serial, 1x Parallel, 1x USB, 1x Monitor, 1x PS/2, 2x PCMCIA, Modem, AUDIO: Mic, Line In, Line Out.
BIOS Version 0005
Extra equipment installed in this case:
100/10 MBit/s SureCom Network Card SU-EP-428X (RTL8139 Family)
128 MB extra RAM
40 GB HD Fujitsu MHS2040AT

Preface

This PC was NOT bought in ALDI, but in "Media Markt" in Flensburg (DE). I have the impression that I am the only human being on the net, who has bought this fine little laptop. It is difficult to find usable drivers or Linux freaks who use this PC - so in desperate frustration I put up this page, simply to fill out this hole in the Web.

Several operating systems have been installed on this laptop:

Mandrake Linux 7.2: did not support the sound card at all.
Mandrake Linux 8.2: Successful install.
Mandrake Linux 9.1: Successful install, after correcting the /etc/modules.conf to load the 8139too instead of 8139cp.
RedHat 9 : Successful install, after correcting the order of the services started. Of course the PCMCIA network card should be started BEFORE the network is started. In /etc/rc.d/rc5.d (Runtime level 5, when booting up in graphical mode), I simply changed the symlink name S24pcmcia to S07pcmcia, so the pcmcia slot is started before the network. This works fine!
Fedora Core 1: Successful, but extremely slow installation. I guess DMA transfer was not enabled for the IDE bus.
Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community : Successful flawless install.

Usually I prefer Mandrake because lots of cool software is included which I seem to miss in RedHat. I especially miss the xfs file system support in RedHat (I know there is a patch for that), but on the other hand, this laptop is not supposed to be a high-performance server, so ext3 will do fine.

The following sections will deal with the Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community installation on the Medion MD 9374 laptop.

Video

The Video card was recognized correctly by the installation program. The Silicon Motion Lynx (Generic) driver with the XFree version 4.3.0 works fine.
The Flat Panel was set to be a Generic Flat Panel 1024 x 768.

Audio

This part is a bit weird. It turns out, that the laptop has been rebooted, the sound card is somehow disabled, and cannot be seen by the bios. This problem exists regardless of the operating system (i.e. also Win XP is affected). The solution is to power cycle the PC, i.e. turning it OFF, wait a few seconds, an then turn it ON again, instead of rebooting it. The sound card detected is the "440MX 810 Chipset AC'97 Audio Controller" using the i810_audio module.

Network and the PCMCIA slot

PCMCIA: the yenta_socket module is automatically loaded at works fine. NETWORK: Previously I used an Genius ME3000II-TP 10 MBit/s Network PCMCIA Card. This is crap! The card gets so hot in the laptop, that it will stall after about 15 minutes of usage. Then the card has to be removed, cooled down, reinserted and it may work for perhaps another 10 minutes.
Therefore I bought a SureCom Network PCMCIA Card (SU-EP-428X) based on the well known and well-supported RealTek 8139 family. This is recognized without any problems. Mandrake also activates the PCMCIA slot before the network card is turned on, as it should be. This card works fine with the 8139too module.

DVD

The DVD drive works fine.

APM

Hitting "Fn+F1" causes the laptop to go into suspend mode. Hitting any key or closing the lid (d'oh!!!) will cause it to become alive again.

IrDA

I have not any equipment to test it.

Modem

Not tested. According to drakconf the modem is not supported. But I did not waste my time to figure out about that.

Touch pad and Keyboard

The touch pad is detected as a PS/2 mouse and is working without any problems. No keyboard problems.

USB

82440MX USB Universal Host Controller was detected without problems.

A note about the Laptop

One may wonder, if a 600 MHz Celeron is powerful enough to work comfortably. I use the extremely fast and cholesterol free desktop XFCE 4 with that laptop, and I am very satisfied with the speed. I strongly recommend this desktop manager! If you previously have used KDE or Gnome, you will love the speed when XFCE starts. The only issue I have with XFCE though is that Open Office 1.1 refuses to enter full screen mode when doing presentation. I have to switch to Gnome or KDE for this to work.

A Note for MS-WINDOWS Users

I have had some trouble with the sound card installation on Windows XP. The Medion home page provides only drivers for W95/98, NT, ME and 2000 but NOT for Windows XP. I used the drivers for Windows 2000 then, and it seems to work. The Device Manager still complains that the sound card could not be started, but it is running and working all right! (Anyone: please mail me, if you know when those lame Medion guys finally provide WinXP drivers, or somewhere else to get it!)

As mentioned earlier, it is VERY IMPORTANT that you power cycle the laptop instead of simply rebooting it. Only when turning the laptop entirely _OFF_ berfore starting it again, the sound will work. Someone told me that a new BIOS version might have fixed that, but he tried it out without success.

Previously under Windows 98 the left audio channel was broken. Even after a reinstallation, one driver update and much fiddling around with the various sound playing programs, it was still just producing noise all the time. Strangely enough this problem was not present when running any of the Linux distributions mentioned above, indicating this may be a Windows 98 driver problem. Win XP running with the Win2k SoundMAX drivers seemed to be a fix to this problem (tsk tsk).

Links

Medion home page with drivers: http://www.medion.de.

07.05.2003, Niels Bassler, bassler(at)phys.au.dk, homepage