In July 2001, I picked up this laptop, plus an external CD-RW (Iomega Predator) for US$2000. I have installed Linux on it. I will keep these pages maintained to show useful information on the installation, supported devices, pitfalls, and other tips, tricks and comments.
First off, I tried booting RedHat 6.2 (Zoot). There were many problems with the v3.3.6 X server, and intermittently with the DVD-ROM (although I did get it to install). Having read reports about RedHat 7.1 (Seawolf) being much better, I gave it a go, and was very impressed: the installation program was very sophisticated, and it went without hitch. It correctly configured the X server and ethernet, and thereafter booted to X, and was visible on the office LAN.
Update: Jason Yasment [note: address weakly concealed] advises me that RedHat 8 is "pretty much plug and play". So you might want to go with that.
Processor: Intel Pentium III, 650MHz, 128KB L2 cache + co-pro die
64-bit Data bus, 32-bit Address bus. 100MHz Front Side Bus
PCI 2.2
Memory: 128MB, expandable to 320MB via internal slot
128 Mbit PC100 SDRAM. 3.3V
BIOS: APM V1.2; ACPI V1.0b; PnP V1.0a; VESA V2.0;
DPMS; DDC2b; SM BIOS V2.3, PCI BIOS V2.1
Hard Disk 10.0GB EIDE, 13ms, PIO Mode4 + Ultra DMA33 Mode2
Seems to have a rather strange Toshiba BIOS: no AMI or Award conventions here. To get into it you need to hit Esc immediately after power-up, and then press F1 to enter the configuration screens.
Seawolf correctly detected the network adapter (Intel 82557), and it works fine. For some reason it always tries to "boot from network" on power-up -- in the absence of a conventional BIOS I don't know how to disable this.
This is a lucent modem, one of the infamous WinModems that have had very poor support for Linux. Until now, that is -- Michael Minn's instructions on how to use the LinModem driver worked for me first time.
Connecting to my ISP with wvdial was straightforward; all that was required was setting the modem device by hand in /etc/wvdial.conf (since the ltmodem driver does not appear as a regular serial port but as /dev/ltmodem), and adding my ISP's nameservers' addresses to /etc/resolv.conf and "multi on" to /etc/host.conf. See the Linux PPP HOWTO for more details
Autodetected; works fine for ISO9660 CDs. DVDs are a little more tricky. I had nothing but trouble from OMI/OMS (Livid) and xine, although I didn't spend more than an hour or two with either. MPlayer, on the other hand, despite its ghetto UI, was more useful. It's a little bit jerky because it's all software decode, and I found that sometimes (consistently on one of the two DVDs I tried, and almost never on the other), the video gets stuck very frequently -- say, once every 15 seconds -- and you have to click it to make it re-read a chunk. This was almost intolerable. However I could watch films with it. The libcss decrpytion module means you can watch any region-rating (cool).
I'll spend some more time in the future to see if I can get it working more smoothly.
Update [Apr 03]: In terms of functionality, the latest version of xine works very well indeed, reading all kinds of discs, showing the menus, etc.. however, unfortunately the software decode is just a little slow (I'm guessing) which means it drops audio every second or so, making it completely useless.
Autodetected, works fine. When booted with external mouse plugged in, the external mouse works and the builtin one is disabled. (I think swittching to VT1 and back to VT7 causes it to rescan.
Note: sometimes the pointer just seems to drift in one direction, even if you aren't touching the "nipple". This is because the system keeps a track of the average location of the sensor over the last, say, 30 secs, and assumes that this is the center position. Don't worry, it's not broken; however there's nothing you can do. The best thing to do is just let go, and it will recalibrate itself sensibly within about 30 secs. In fact, you can induce this behaviour simply by pushing the nipple in one direction only for a while: the pointer will start to drift in the opposite direction. This shows you why it is in fact a bad idea to "fight the drift": it only makes it worse.
Autodetected; works fine -- although I prefer to disable CapsLock, and have mapped the four keys at top right (PrtSc, Pause, Window, Menu) to F13, F14, F15 and F16 for use with my window manager. (The MS Windows keys are handy for maximise/minimise). See the .xmodmap below for details.
! xmodmap file for Toshiba laptop ! make CapsLock another shift key clear Lock add Shift = Caps_Lock ! PrtSc, Pause, Win, Menu keycode 111 = F13 keycode 113 = F14 keycode 115 = F15 keycode 117 = F16
"Scroll" buttons just above the main mouse buttons -- no idea what these are about, xev reports nothing so I presume I need a different mouse driver. Possibly related to MS "IntelliMouse" scrolling function?? (experiment with Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 2")
The keys F1, F2, F3 and F4 have special meaning when used in conjunction with Fn key:
| Key | Symbol | Function | Notes |
| F1 | Padlock | Lock computer | Locks the keypad and turns the backlight on/off. If a password is configured, it must be entered to continue. |
| F2 | Tap/Faucet | Power-save | Cycles through three power-level modes; the backlight intensity changes, but I don't yet know what the effect on processor speed or battery life is. On Windows, there are hooks into some graphical system applet; I have yet to figure out if the Toshiba Utils for Linux will do a similar job. |
| F3 | Power-up | Power-up Mode | Hooks into graphical applet to configure power-up mode. |
| F4 | Speaker | System beep | Cycles through various volumes of system (buzzer) beep. I think this has no effect on the actual sound hardware though. |
| F5 | TV | External monitor | Cycle through various combinations of LCD, TV and external VGA monitor. The effect of this is that the display becomes broken into six identical repeated `tiles'. I have yet to test this with an external monitor. |
Not yet tested with external keyboard.
Adaptor: 3D support; 16-bit stereo; SB Pro compatible; MIDI playback; 64-chan wavetable; Full duplex;. PC: Built-in stereo speakers with subwoofer; mic + headphone ports
Seawolf detected the Yamaha hardware, but doesn't produce any sound (just an irritating buzzing noise). Downloaded and installed the ALSA drivers package, it worked first time (I followed the "ALSA for the YAMAHA-DSXG" instructions below, but they basically just tell you how to install ALSA -- there's no magic to it). ALSA installs an RC script, /etc/rc.d/init.d/alsasound. To ensure this gets executed in all runlevels I did chkconfig --levels 23456 alsasound.
The drivers work really well, and the sound is surprisingly good: there's a silver button marked "Bass" that I assumed would be inoperative outside of MS Windows, but it does indeed work, and you get quite a clear, loud, bassy, stereo sound out of the machine.
Links:
Adapter autodetected, works fine with XFree86 v4. 1024x768 16bit. (XF86 config available here.)
I have added vga=3846 (i.e. 0x0f06) to my lilo.conf file under the image labelled "linux", so that I get an 80x34 terminal. Larger ones (with penguin!) are available but the fonts are rather unpleasant.
Thanks to Jeremy Brooks (jeremy.brooks at bams dot com) for providing this link to somewhere that sells batteries for less than the 200 USD which Toshiba seem to require. (Currently it's $139). (Also I found this place which seems to be even cheaper (120 bucks).
Annoyingly, if the machine is left idle for long periods it goes into some kind of powersaving state (akin to Fn-F1) but often it cannot be made to come out of the state, requiring the machine to be rebooted. I have tried changing the BIOS "powersave enable" to off, to see if this makes a difference; doesn't seem to.
Update: I've had it for a year now, and I rarely use it on the battery, it spends most of its life plugged in to the wall. However the battery life has deteriorated a lot: I now get about 75 minutes on full charge (and that's in low-drain mode [Fn-F2]). Perhaps removing the battery when not required increases its life, I don't know. Also, the APM reporting of predicted battery life is very non-linear: the last 45 minutes go by in about five!
Question: anyone know a good way to reduce the amount of disk traffic on Linux? With hdparm(8), you can make the HD spin down more aggressively, but it spins up always within 15 seconds. What daemons or kernel threads are responsible, and what can be done? MS Windows is much better at this, and thus gets longer battery life (so I've heard).
Autodetected chipset, works fine: detected my CD-RW as soon as it was plugged in. Drive appears as /dev/scd0 and I can read/eject this device. I created a symlink /dev/predator to point to this. Occasionally I have had to do rmmod/insmod usb-uhci in order to make it see the drive when it was hot-plugged (although possibly the external unit may not have been powered up when I connected it).
The version of cdrtools that came installed with RH7.1 insisted that my CD-RW drive was a "Generic MMC CD-ROM", but could not see the write capability. However simply installing the latest version of cdrtools (1.11a06) from the source RPMs at rpmfind.net did the trick, and cdrecord dev=0,0,0 creates working disks.
(BTW I have always found CD recording technology to be less than perfect, and experience a rate of attrition of around 10%: sometimes you get buffer underruns, even on systems that are very high performance; other times, spurious bus errors etc. Therefore I never try to record at speeds above 2x). Also, I have had worse results with 80 min disks (which are illegal according the the Red Book standard), but sadly 74 min disks don't seem to be available any more.
I think that there might still be a problem ripping audio disks in the external drive as cdparanoia doesn't consider it as either an IDE or SCSI interface and refuses to use the drive. (Need to have a look at this)
One other thing: the device runs very hot, so you might want to unplug it when not in use and beware of where you place it.
Update: actually, my success rate is around 60-75% with audio, and with ISO9660, it's so low that I rarely use it. I haven't taken the time to investigate, but you might want to get in touch with Yves Dorfsman [note: address weakly concealed] who told me he had better results, or check out his page.
Apart from my exact variant of the Canon IXUS not being supported by gphoto-2.0beta1, and thus requiring hacking in of some extra table entries (using the data found in /proc/bus/usb/devices), it worked fine with gphoto2 on the command line.
This camera is the Canon DIGITAL IXUS v; it supports limited video recording as well as still. It cost 350 quid at Heathrow Airport -- a bargain; they even threw in some free memory.
Update: I love this camera, it produces very good pictures (even in the dark, so long as the flash can illuminate the subject). However it developed the dreaded "E18" fault, which seems to be a consistent design flaw. Click here to see what Google throws up on this: various angry testimonials. I should say that, although I had to send the camera back to Canon in the UK, their service center in Colchester was very helpful and efficient and fixed it under warranty.
This device worked pretty much out of the box: connecting the drive, or inserting a disk, caused the USB service to recognise it and (sometimes) mount the volume. Ejecting the device does an unmount first. Mostly it's very clean, but sometimes the mount() call hangs forever, though I'm not sure why.
If for some reason it doesn't work, you might want to try the commands to install the necessary modules (actually, some of these may not be necessary):
% modprobe usb-uhci % modprobe scsi_mod % modprobe sd_mod % modprobe usb-storage % modprobe ide-scsi % modprobe fat % modprobe vfat % modprobe sg % grep Product /proc/bus/usb/devices S: Product=USB UHCI Root Hub S: Product=USB UHCI Root Hub S: Product=USB Zip 100 S: Product=USB UHCI Root Hub
Note the ZIP disks appear as SCSI disks, i.e. on /dev/sda. Also, bizarrely, it always searches for the 4th partition, sda4, so when you format a disk with fdisk, make sure you only create one primary partition, and give it the number 4.
An example session to partition, format and mount a blank disk is shown below. You might want to delete (d) any existing partitions if the disk is not blank.
% fdisk /dev/sda4 n # new partition p # primary partition 4 # partition number 4 1 # first cylinder <Enter> # last cylinder (default=all) t # change type of partition (defaults to 4) b # 0xb (Win95 FAT32) w # commit changes % mkfs.vfat /dev/sda4 % mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip
- multiple homes -- dialup + ethernet
- Experiment with hdparm for performance, powersaving, standby mode
- As mentioned, can't get the disk to spin down for very long.
- Get DVD video working
- Got some results with MPlayer, but the picture sometimes sticks.
Press space to unstick (or paste a space using the middle mouse
button so you can sit back). Also the CPU isn't quite fast enough
to do it perfectly smoothly.
- Access to BIOS / Toshiba Utilities.
- Jonathan Buzzard' utilities -- see below for link. They all work
find but they're really use-once tools for configuration
- fan control: I use fan -d, so it's always spinning when plugged in to
the wall, and only spinning on the battery when required.
- PCMCIA
- cardmgr: It works. PCMCIA 802.11 wireless network card worked
out of the box.
- hibernation/sleep mode
- experiment with this.
A note about weight: I have got into the routine of using the machine as a miniature desktop computer (in my student pad), with the advantage that I can take it with me when I go on long trips. However I started out by carrying it around with me quite a lot, but quickly found that it is really very heavy (7.28lb, according to the specs), and even with a good quality laptop back-pack, I still get aching shoulders. If you want a machine to travel with a lot (e.g. to use while commuting by train) I would stongly suggest you look at machines with smaller displays, and fewer builtin peripherals: the large screen is only a comfort-factor and the peripherals are rarely required while on the move.
Other Linux/laptop sites:
Drivers and HW support:
Manufacturers' pages:
Other installation guides:
hdparm(8) utility:
DVD tools:
My iPod page