Sorry for the absence of fresh bloggage lately. My old Compaq Presario 800-something (4ish pounds, very lightweight) finally bit the dust. Well, not quite, but it became untenabably unreliable. It fell a foot or two, landed on the power connector, and suddenly obtaining an uninterrupted supply of power became a very tenuous matter -- the power connection is lost upon slight movements. And as the Compaq's battery is ancient, and holds approximately 90 seconds of power when fully charged, this means that the computer was now subject to dying at the slightest provocation.

I'd known the Compaq needed to be replaced soon. It started to lose keys a few months ago. First the "N" key went, but I could blame that on a previous unfortunate incident involving the vacuum cleaner. I kept it going by swapping in one of the lesser-used keys. But then the "C" started to come off every couple of keystrokes. So I substituted the second "Control" key. Then the "M" started to go. Replaced it with the "Windows" key. But I was fast running out of keys. (I hate throwing away a thousand-plus-dollar piece of equipment because eight-cent plastic parts were failing.)

The USB ports were going too. The slightest connection interrupted the connection to the external storage device, keyboard or camera.

So it was actually kind of a relief.

The Toshiba: Overview

At 6.2 pounds, the new laptop weighs a lot more than the old one -- about 50% more. I liked the light weight of the Compaq, but, alas, I didn't have time to special-order one and all the new computers seem to come in the 6.2 to 9.5 pound range. Ugh! It used to be I could throw in it the bag and go -- but now I definitely notice the extra weight. And I get tired of setting in on my legs after a short time.

On the other hand, it's got one of those relatively-giant LCD screens -- at 14.2" diagonal and 1280x800 pixels. And unlike the old ones, this one has a special black-layer of pixels, which produces a nice black black. And it's (supposedly) about three times as fast as the box it replaces (the Compaq was a mere 400 Mhz, the new Toshiba is 1.5 Ghz). And four times the RAM as well, at 512M.

But theres a bit of drawback. You see, though I never blog about it, I'm one of those geeky Linux users. And so I actually prefer to do the bulk of my work under Linux. So... I set about trying to load Linux on this beasty. In case anyone is attempting to do the same, I'm going to describe what I've done so far in great geeky detail. So if you're a normal human being you might want to consider skipping the rest of this posting, which I've written for the one or two other people in the entire world who will try to load Linux on one of these babies.

See ya later!

Linux on the Toshiba: Part 1: Repartitioning

Unless you want to kiss windows goodbye completely, the first trick is always to find a niche in which to load Linux. I tend to like System Commander, which allows you to resize existing Windows partitions. If you don't mind parting with $70. It's still a bit tricky to use -- you have to make a few modifications to it if you don't have a floppy drive. If you decide to buy it online be sure to back up your copy to a CDROM or another computer (or both) before you use it, since one possible result can be loss of data, and you don't want to repurchase it again.

In retrospect, I've learned that you can achieve the same effect by blowing away the Windows partition, creating a smaller NTFS 3.5 partition, and then reinstaling windows on the new, smaller partition, and then Linux on a new one.

After a bit of this, and a few different things being installed at the boot block, I got the Toshiba configurd to use LILO as the boot loader, Windows XP on the first partition, and Debian installed on the Linux partition.

Part 2: Networking

Sadly, I've not yet been able to figure out what bizarre sort of onboard ethernet adaptor has been included, so, after a bit of futzing, I just cut the Gordian Knot by using an old, inexpensive Linksys PCMCIA ethernet adaptor from three laptop computers ago. Which worked without need for any drivers (under 2.4.18 kernel), for no reason I can adequately discern.

Only gotcha: Doesn't seem to work correctly with DHCP at the moment. So I've got to manually assign it an address first ("ifconfig eth0 10.0.1.14"), and then run dhclient manually to force it to pick up the right IP address, DNS servers, etc.

Someday, this will be vastly improved.

Random Observation: Under Windows, noticed that the built-in wireless networking had picked up several nearby connection points. Didn't decide to see if I could connect through them.

Part 3: Getting XFree86 Working

The next major challenge was getting nice, pretty graphics up and working. To make a long story short, I was fortunate enough to discover the latest and greatest (4.4) version of XFree86 supported the Toshiba's NVidia GeForce (or "G-Force") graphics card, and equally, if not more, fortunate to discover some saint had made some ready-made packages to install the new version.

Just add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb ftp://debian.fifi.org/pub/debian-local woody/unofficial/
deb-src ftp://debian.fifi.org/pub/debian-local woody/unofficial/

Sadly, XFree86 didn't' seem to like the nonstandard resolution. So some other wonderful person had posted a trick to XFree86 to support a 1280x800 resolution LCD screen. Integrated it into my own normal setup, and tweaked it a bit to make it work correctly. You can download the final result, with USB mouse and keyboard support and all, here, if you're so inclined.

Part 4: Sound

The bane of Linux is unusual, fresh hardware. This Toshiba has it in spades. -- it's got some kind of AC97-derived proprietary sound hardware. Downloaded the trial version of OSS, which supported it. But sadly, for some reason, under high CPU loads, strange things happen and the sound breaks up. Which I guess is unsuprising, given that Windows pretty much admitted that the sound was being done in software, not hardware.

So unless something improves, I'll probably not be doing much sound under Linux, and will probably rely more upon my trusty MP3 player.

So, in short, if you're looking for a Linux-friendly box, at the moment, I can't recommend the Toshiba M35-S320, lovely as it is under Windows. This situation will probably inmprove in the future as more geeks swarm over the new configuration, dropping improved code behind them.

And perhaps one of the other distros already does this better than Debian, which is always less easy to install, but much easier to maintain over the long run (IMHO), with its beautiful package-management system.

I'll update this should I learn more in the future, so feel free to check back if you're interested.