Toshiba 2450-101

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Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 16:09:52 +0100

Installing Linux on a Toshiba 2450-101 Laptop
           ______________________________________________

   Table of Contents
   Introduction
   Hardware
   Notes about the experience
   Conclusion

Introduction

   This documents my experience in installing GNU/Linux onto a
   Toshiba 2450-101 laptop. I used Red Hat Linux 9 as my
   distribution of choice. Mileage may vary with other
   distributions, though anything that's possible under Red Hat
   should be possible under all distributions with appropriate
   tweaking.

   The essential website for any Toshiba laptop linux
   experimenting is Toshiba's unofficial Linux page.
     _________________________________________________________

Hardware

Working hardware

   After going through the standard install process, the
   following hardware works.

     * Monitor
     * Keyboard
     * Touch pad
     * Hard drive
     * CD-R/RW/ROM and DVD-ROM
     * Graphics card
     * Sound card
     * Network card
     * USB ports
     _________________________________________________________

Untested hardware

   Some of the hardware I haven't tested since I don't use it on
   a regular basis, if at all.

     * Firewire ports (although they are detected)
     * Monitor/S-VIDEO out
     * PC card slots
     * Software modem

   Note

   Although I have not tested the software modem myself, I have
   read reviews where people have got this particular model to
   work under Linux. Extra drivers are required, though.
     _________________________________________________________

Unworking hardware

   Power management - ACPI or APM - doesn't seem to work at all,
   at least with a 2.4 kernel. This means no hibernate, suspend
   or auto-power-off. If someone can get this to work, please
   contact me.

   Power management does work under Windows.
     _________________________________________________________

Notes about the experience

Repartitioning the hard drive

   From the factory, the hard drive is pre-partitioned with 1
   FAT32 partition containing Windows XP. If you want to have a
   Linux-only machine, you can boot the installation CD-ROM
   straight away and wipe this partition. If, like the majority
   of people and myself, you wish to dual-boot, you will have to
   shrink this partition.

   The most well-known way of doing this is to use Partition
   Magic. I used Partition Magic 7 to shrink my Windows partition
   down to 15 Gb, which worked fine. I didn't create any Linux
   partitions with Partition Magic because I trust the Linux
   tools more for doing that sort of thing.

   Note

   The laptop only has a 30 Gb hard disk. 2 operating systems
   will use a few Gb of this in their normal installs. Be sure
   that 30 Gb is enough for your everyday needs.

   When creating partitions, I created a standard Red Hat 100 Mb
   /boot partition (though this is excessive, 25 Mb will do
   fine), 200 Mb /tmp partition (the theory in having a separate
   partition for this is that a runaway program won't fill your
   root hard drive with silly logs), a 250 Mb swap partition and
   the rest as the root partition. Since then I have removed the
   /tmp partition since the GNOME 2.4 CD burning tool that comes
   with Ximian Desktop needs 500 Mb free space in /tmp for
   creating a CD image. So that was a waste of space, since I
   can't resize ext3 partitions.
     _________________________________________________________

The graphics driver

   If you only want to use 2D applications, the graphics driver
   installed by Red Hat is fine. If you want to play Tux Racer
   you'll need a 3D accelerated driver.

   This is available from NVIDIA's linux driver page. You need
   the IA32 version. Note that it is free of charge, but not Free
   Software. Installation is fairly easy, but remember to read
   the README. You need to make small changes to /etc/XF86Config.
     _________________________________________________________

Monitor unblanking

   The monitor automatically blanks after a certain amount of
   time. When it unblanks, the graphical X desktop is misaligned.
   It's difficult to describe the problem, but it makes X
   unusable without a restart. This happens with either GeForce 4
   video driver.

   It can be fixed quite easily, by going into the BIOS settings
   by holding down ESC when you see the Toshiba logo at boot and
   then pressing F1 when prompted. You can then disable screen
   blanking. This has the side effect of your screen being always
   on, though, but it's the only workaround I have been able to
   find.
     _________________________________________________________

Reinstalling Windows (if you ever need to)

   The CD that comes with the laptop is a Windows recovery CD,
   not a proper install disk. It resets the hard disk to as it
   was when you bought the laptop, including partition table
   information. If you ever use it, you will completely wipe
   linux from your hard drive. Back up first!
     _________________________________________________________

Conclusion

   This laptop is Linux-compatible, with the exception of power
   management. I was nervous when I installed Linux, certain that
   something would go wrong, but I haven't had any major
   problems. Big thumbs-up to Toshiba!

--
Andrew Sobala

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