Bought myself a laptop. Definately not top of the line but I decided it would do for what I wanted to do.
I started by using Partion Magic 8 to reduce the size of the Windows XP partition (having XP around whilst annoying may come in handy one of these days). I ended up leaving myself 15 gig for Linux.
This was easy. Stick in the Debian 3.0 disk and chicken peck the buttons. A few minor issues but they got fixed once everything was installed and I compiled a new kernel.
These, from memory (I am completing this document after its initial submission to the toshiba-linux mailing list for including on the web) were to do with the CD burner primarily.
Ended up using 2.4.18 with some toshiba specific patches. Once I can refind out what was changed shall notify people here.
Supported out of the box with a new kernel install and MAKEDEV usb
My USB mouse works fine under X.
I tested my recently purchases Song Cybershot DSC-P73 under unix using
the command gphoto2 -P (as root only for the moment) and it seemed to work fine. Infact it seemed to copy them off quicker than the Windows XP equivilant.
Installing networking was a bit of a pain. The kernel didn't seem to contain the right
drivers but after about 30 minutes of looking I found driver source
on the Intel website. I downloaded it, copied it to CD and then copied
it to the laptop (It comes with no floppy drive and I don't own a USB floppy drive
just yet). Unpacked it and typed make install it worked fine.
The card appears to give good performance on the LAN.
Setting up X was a pain in the arse. No drivers for it by default on the install CD. I did get the VESA drivers happening using version 3 of X, but it was shockingly bad, especially the default boot of KDE.
I then found some drivers for the chipset on the Intel website
(didn't take too much searching). The driver in question is for the
Intel 852GM chip.
However, ./installing the drivers didn't make anything
better. Yelled and screamed a lot. Had some caffeine, and read some more
on the website and other places and came to the realisation that the
drivers from Intel expected a newer version of X than the one I was
using. Did an apt-get upgrade to the unstable version of X,
re-ran the ./install and it all worked.
The drivers are source code. And unfortunately, upon each X upgrade they need reinstalling.
This is a working copy of XF86Config-4 for my particular laptop. DRI seems to be flakey so its turned off. Not entirely sure if that is a hardware fault or a driver fault.
Got the burner happening using ide-scsi which is best
dealt with a Google search. Burner
works fine, although (like in XP) it chews a lot of the disc time.
DVD for data works fine by mount /cdrom. Xine
plays DVDs fine using the device /dev/scd0
Works fine.
Initially it did not work. Solved by using ALSA, using the i8x0 module. I guess at this point look at the ALSA documents to work out how this is best done. Unfortunately this section is being written well after the fact of me getting the audio working.
Somewhere along the way I had to play with the alsa mixer settings to keep the volume happening but for the moment I can't remember how I did it.
I also wish to investigate jackd and low latency audio
for musical reasons. I create music
and would love to do 99% of it in Linux, both for happiness reasons and
morbid curiousity. It can done, just not sure if a laptop is the best
answer ;)
Inbuilt and have not tried to use it (under Linux or Windows).
Some useful links t start with: