Setup of Toshiba 6100 Pro for GNU/Linux
Cipher Brain has bought a Toshiba 6100 Pro to load it primarily with GNU/Linux. Please find here a few tips about setting it up.
Update: after having had a horrible experience with Toshiba Support, spread on more than two monthes, numerous phone calls, faxes and letter (concerning another notebook), and a lot of hardware problems with this notebook (including two power supply faillures in one month, broken display, defective hard-disk and keyboards problem), I’ve given up with Toshiba. I’ll let this information here, in the hope that it will be of any use to somebody.
Personally, I can’t recommend anymore usage of Toshiba notebook computers.
System specification
| Item | Specification | HardDrake report |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Pentium Pro IV, 1.7GHz | Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Mobile CPU 1.70GHz, Frequency: 1694, FPU, MMX, MogoMIPS:3381.65 |
| Memory | 256Mb | 255Mb |
| CDROM/DVD | Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-R2102 | Device: /dev/hda, Bus type: ATAPI/IDE Device: /dev/scd0, Bus type: SCSI |
| Hard Disk | Toshiba MK4019GAX, 39069Mb | Reported by HardDrake as 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4864 cylinders |
| Video Card | nVidia | Unknown |
| Bluetooth | ||
| Wifi |
The full XML report from HardDrake is linked here.
Toshiba pages
Toshiba has some interresting pages for setup
Distribution choice
I went with Mandrake 8.2, because I had experience of it, from when I used it with my previous employer. Nothing here is very distribution specific, so you should be able to use those instructions with most distributions. BSD people might also use those about XFree. More help for BSD people should be located here
The machine was initially setup as a dual boot, with a definite choice to be made between Windows 2000 and Windows XP. After choosing XP, and making the few steps to install it, I was left with one partition of 20Gb with XP (formatted in VFAT), and another one, empty, of 20Gb, also VFAT.
One partition being a bit bigger than the other one, I carefully noted which one I wanted to keep (with Windows XP), and which one I wanted to reformat for Linux.
Here is the output of fdisk after setting up the system:
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4864 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 2434 4864 19527007+ 5 Extended /dev/hda2 * 2 2433 19535040 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/hda5 2434 3070 5116671 b Win95 FAT32 /dev/hda6 3071 4217 9213214+ 83 Linux /dev/hda7 4218 4267 401593+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hda8 4268 4864 4795371 83 Linux Partition table entries are not in disk order
Mandrake installation
No problem here, except that the nVidia card was not detected. I specified that I wanted to use XFree 4, and asked to boot in text mode.
After having the basic system run in text mode, I downloaded the nVidia drivers from their site, installed them as they say.
I had to add this line to my /etc/modules.conf:
options NVdriver NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0
Not doing that gives a black band on the right of the screen. Chris Griffis reported to me that he had to put the next line in /etc/modules.conf
options NVdriver "NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0" "NVreg_Mobile=2"
You can find my XF86Config-4 file here. Note that I manually switch between having a dual head (one with the TFT of the laptop, the left screen, and a cheap monitor (the right screen); and one with only the internal screen).
Stephen Jordan, who uses Debian Woody, recommend adding the following line in /etc/modutils/aliases:
#NVdriver portion alias char-major-195 NVdriver
That’s all the configuration that I made… Here follows a report about what works, what doesn’t, and what I don’t use (yet):
| Part | Status | Remark |
|---|---|---|
| Sound | OK | See below |
| PS/2 port | OK for keyboard and mouse | I use currently external PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 scroll mouse with a Y connector with no problem at all |
| Parallel port | OK | See below |
| Integrated LAN | OK | e100 module |
| PCMCIA | Seems OK | Detected my PCMCIA cards right, but I couldn’t use my SCSI PCMCIA card to test, since my SCSI drive is broken… |
| CDROM | OK | Seen as /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 |
| CD-R | OK | See below |
| DVD | OK | See below |
| Bluetooth | Seems OK | Currently testing, see Linux Bluetooth (supported devices) and below |
| Wifi | ? | Not tested, recognized at boot time. Paul Terweduwe reported to me that it was working fine for him. |
| Acceleratd card | OK | but not in dual screen mode! |
| Keyboard | OK | See below |
| Serial port | OK | No problem |
The small details
Sound
It was auto-probed, but here is the lines which Mandrake inserted for me in my /etc/modules.conf:
alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio
Stephen Jordan, who uses Debian Woody, recommended me the next settings:
- In /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh, to override the sound-driver’s default behaviour of muting all channels at boot:
amixer set Master 74% unmute amixer set PCM 55% unmute amixer set CD 81% unmute
- In /etc/modutils/aliases:
# ALSA portion alias char-major-116 snd alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0 # module options should go here # OSS/Free portion alias char-major-14 soundcore alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0 # card #1 alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
and then use the update-modules utility to cause the automated systems to insert these lines in /etc/modules.conf.
Parallel port
I had to enable it in the bios, and make it use IO port 0×378 and interrupt 7, then add this line to /etc/modules.conf:
options parport_pc io=0x378 irq=7
In the BIOS (accessible by pressing the Delete key at startup time, the F1 when proposed to by a short message), I have the following settings:
Parallel Port Mode = Std. Bi-Direct. Device Config. = All Devices Serial = COM1 (3F8H/IRQ4) Parallel = LPT1 (378H/IRQ7)
CD-ROM
I can rip my CDs very fast with CD-paranoia, with all checks on, at about 4x the normal speed. It seems that data can be recovered quite easily from the CDs…
CD-R
I burn CD-Rs with the next command, with no problem since now (and I made a diff -r on every one of the first 5 CDs I made):
cdrecord -V speed=8 dev=0,0,0 /tmp/CD.iso
DVD
I could see unencrypted DVDs using Xine with no problem. Still can’t see encrypted one, but that not a problem with the drive 
Keyboard
It seems that I have the same problem as lots of people have with Toshiba notebooks. The keyboard is not working properly under X11: sometimes when I push a key, two or three characters appear on the screen. It happens all the time, and is not user-friendly at all.
Some people report this as being a problem with Toshiba that doesn’t send the proper key events in the proper order, which explains that the keyboard works with Windows. Some other say me that the problem is a X11 problem which can be cured with the accessX program (Thanks to Chatchawan Wongsiriprasert for the link).
A work-around for me was to disable ‘xkb’ extensions on X11, but you are then supposed to loose your ‘Alt Gr+xxx’ keys, which are absolutely needed on a Belgian keyboard as mine (it includes the pipe ‘|’, the backslash, closing angle bracket,…)
Disabling Xkb can be done by adding in the InputDevice section of /etc/XFConfig86-4 the following line:
Option "XkbDisable" "yes"
If you do this, the keyboard works fine, but the ‘Alt’ keys don’t work anymore. However, I found that on my PC solving that was as easy as to type the next line to reload the X keyboad mappings.
xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.be
Bluetooth
I’ve bought a Nokia 6310i GSM, with bluetooth, and wanted to connect it to my SP6100 (with bluetooth). I haven’t tested every points of it yet, but I’m progressing. For now, the PC can contact the phone, and get some information about it, so I suppose that I’ll progress fast from here. I detail here what I did. I was inspired by the page http://www.holtmann.org/linux/bluetooth/toshiba.html. Also, I’m not sure if all the steps done were requiered…
- In /etc/modules.conf: add
alias char-major-10-181 toshiba
- Execute
mknod -m 666 /dev/toshiba c 10 181
- Get dmabt, compile and execute it (this has to be executed every time you want to use bluetooth)
- Add to /etc/modules.conf:
alias net-pf-31 bluez alias bt-proto-0 12cap alias bt-proto-2 sco
- Download ‘bluez-libs’ (from bluez web site), compile and install. This creates the files:
- /usr/include/bluetooth/*
- /usr/lib/libbluetooth*
- Download ‘bluez-utils’ (from bluez web site), compile and install. This creates the files:
- /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf
- /etc/bluetooth/pin
- /bin/hcitool
- /bin/l2ping
- /bin/bluepin
- /sbin/hciattach
- /sbin/hciconfig
- /usr/share/man/man8/hciattach.8
- /usr/share/man/man8/l2ping.8
- /etc/rc.d/init.d/bluetooth
- /etc/pcmcia/bluetooth
- /etc/pcmcia/bluetooth.conf
- Execute hciconfig hci0 up
- Now, you can use ‘hcitool dev’, ‘hcitool scan’,… !
Other links
Please find here some other links which might be usefull.