This page was started a few hours after I got the first machine,
and developed as I learnt more.
As soon as it was working sufficiently, it was taken back by its user,
so I no longer have access to the machine
(unless it happens to be on the internet, which is rare).
Another user got the second machine, so I've had another chance to poke.
Then one got the T7220CTe, and it all went pear shaped
(til timr came to the rescue!).
Finally someone wanted something that worked,
so got another 7140.
However, other readers have sent in their experience such as
SuSE 6.4,
Slackware 7.0
and
Debian 2.2 `Potato'
and asked questions,
some of which I could answer from memory or log files kept on our servers.
Please feel free to send any comments etc to
me.
The variously `official' Toshiba Linux pages (de and jp) have no Linux info yet :-(
This report is listed at TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, notebooks, PDAs and mobile phones under Toshiba
They claim up to 3 hours for the standard battery and up to 5 hours for the High Capacity battery.
The standard battery
(see gif graphs:
184x151@1k,
363x277@3k
or
596x404@5k)
seems to last around 2:40 under Linux, and takes 4 hours to recharge if in use.
When charging, it stays at 0 for 20 mins, then jumps to 10%, before rising
steadily until it flattens off between 80% and 90% then jumps to 100%.
It starts beeping when there are just 8 mins (2%) battery life left.
At 3 mins (1%) it suspends itself to RAM - reconnecting power and pressing
the power button brings it back on.
The `power' button suspends it to memory, using about 1% of the standard battery capacity per hour.
For a machine without the docking station, using RH6.1, use the PCMCIA boot disk,
and to the LILO: prompt, type `text' as it cannot drive the screen under X.
If the docking station is available, and using RH6.2, the standard netboot disk can be used, and it `falls back' to text mode when X fails.
If doing a RH 6.1 PCMCIA install, if the `PC Card' setting in the BIOS is
`Auto-Selected'(the default), the PCMCIA adaptor
appears to think that 3Com EtherLink III 3c589 C and D cards and
3Com Megahertz cards such as 3CCFE574BT
are memory rather than network cards
(use Alt-Ctrl-F4 to select VC4 to see the PCMCIA messages),
so set it to `PCIC Compatible' if you have problems with a
`PC card' card, or to CardBus if you have a CardBus card.
As I couldn't find a way to enter the BIOS
(hold down ESC during startup),
and as the user wanted Dual Boot anyway, I booted into W98,
shutdown to DOS mode, and used TSETUP - the alternative is to use the supplied Toshiba `Companion Diskette / Supports Windows 98 / Disk 1 of 1 / Version W98C07ENB2 / Date: 19-11-1999' which is worth saving on line somewhere so that a new one can be created if the original is lost.
Works fine under 6.1 with `Auto-Selected' for a D-Link DE-650,
and for a 3CXFE575BT under 6.2.
7.1 `just worked' with a 3Com ...
This note describes what was required to set up SuSE 6.4 Linux on a Toshiba 7200CT Portege laptop. The system was set up to dual boot Windows 2000 and Linux. It came pre-installed with NT 4.0, and was purchased with a Netgear FA410TXC 10/100 PCMCIA network card, and a Freecom Traveller DVDROM drive with PCMCIA interface. An Adaptec 1460 SlimSCSI PCMCIA card was also available.
Initially Redhat 6.2 was installed. This installed correctly, but it was only possible to boot using a boot floppy, and the PCMCIA did not appear to work correctly. It was also not possible to configure the display. Information at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop indicated that XFree86 release 4 should work with the display, and since this was included (albeit as an additional, unsupported package) on the SuSE 6.4 distribution, it was decided to use SuSE instead.
SuSE Linux was installed on a disk partitioned as follows:
P1 Primary Partition containing NTFS (5Gb)To install it was necessary to load PCMCIA support, to give access to either the network card or a SCSI card. Unfortunately the PCMCIA core i82365 module failed to load correctly. The SuSE web site contained am RPM file containing a patch, but this patch could only be used after installing Linux. To get round this, we downloaded the RPM, and used rpm2cpio to convert it to a CPIO archive, from which it was possible to extract the files. SuSE installation provides 2 floppies, one of which is a Modules floppy. This contains a FAT file system with 3 gzipped files, each containing a Minix file system. The `Other Modules' file was copied off floppy, gunzipped, and then the file mounted on a Linux system as a file system using the loopback driver. The updated modules from the patch were then copied in, the file system unmounted, and the files gzipped again and copied back to floppy.
P2 Primary Partition containing Linux swap (128 Mb)
P3 Primary Partition containing Linux Ext2
The new modules disk overcame the previous PCMCIA problem, but there were then interrupt conflicts. These were solved by passing the parameter ``irq_list=7,9,10,12,14,15'' to the i82365 module. The system then successfully found the network card and the Adaptec 1460, giving access to a CDROM drive.
The first install was done using graphical YaST, but on reboot this failed to handle the display, and the machine locked up.
A second attempt was made using test-based YaST, and this installed correctly, but the installed partition failed to boot either from floppy or from a boot loader. LiLo, NT and ninu loaders were all tried, but all failed. The problem was believed to be caused by the Linux partition going beyond Cylinder 1024 of the disk, so the disk was repartitioned with 4 partitions, with the third ending at cylinder 1023. This cured the boot problem, and it was possible to install Linux and boot it.
The next problem was that the installed system did not contain the PCMCIA patches. These were installed from floppy, but the recommended command:
rpm -Uhv -force pcmcia_m.rpm
Failed because of missing dependencies. However adding the -nodeps switch appear to work, and it was then possible to access PCMCIA devices. Unfortunately the failure at first boot meant that networking was not properly set up, and it was necessary to do this manually and then editing /etc/rc.config to set the entry:
NETCONFIG="_0"so that the first network card was started.
By then most things were working; all that was left was to get a Windows display. This required XFree86 Release 4, which was contained in the /unsorted directory of CD 2 of the SuSE distribution, as an RPM file. The file was installed using RPM, and the following was then necessary to get X working:
The boot loaded LiLo was configured with vga=791, set in /etc/lilo.conf. This give a larger text display. The XF86Config was downloaded from the above web site, and copied into /etc and /etc/X11. The display could then be started using the startx command. Any other attempt to configure X with standard configuration programs failed.
The Freecom DVDROM drive is recognised, but reports lost interrupts and cannot be accessed (yet).
Here are the specs for the 7200 as I got it:
It came with a PIII 600Mhz processor, 192 Megs of RAM, and a 12gig Hard Drive. The sound card is the Maestro ESS and comes with it the internal 56k modem, and the PCMCIA network card is a Xircom Cardbus 10/100 NIC. I also got the docking station that comes with it, with the 3com NIC built in, and floppy drive and the DVD/CD-ROM built in.
The Install
I made this a dual boot system with Windows 2000. I set up three partitions:
/dev/hda1 / (ext2) about 3 gigs
/dev/hda2 /home (ext2) about 4 gigs
/dev/hda3 /windows2000 (fat 32) the rest of the drive
PCMCIA
To get LILO to work with Win2k is just like dual booting with Win 9X, so that was no big deal. When I first booted to Linux it hung and it appeared it was the PCMCIA support that was causing it. After rebooting in single user mode and commenting out the call to rc.pcmcia in /etc/rc.d/rc.S it booted no problem. I downloaded the newest PCMCIA support and modules from SourceForge.Net, configured it (tulip for my Xircom NIC) and rebooted. I had to go into BIOS (as described in the BIOS HACK - Esc then F1) and had to change the PC Card Controller Mode from Automatic to 'Cardbus/16-bit'. I then had to edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts to change the irq exclude list (as supplied by someone from toshiba):
exclude irq 4After this I rebooted again and ran `./rc.pcmcia start' and pcmcia worked. As far as I know this is a big problem for most Toshibas (protege 7200, 7020ct, 7000, etc) mixed with Xircom Cardbus pcmcia cards. To finish it off I uncommented the lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.S that start rc.pcmcia
exclude irq 9
exclude irq 10
exclude irq 11
exclude irq 12
#exclude irq 3
#exclude irq 7
X Windows
I set in /etc/lilo.conf `vga=791' as suggested to get 1024x768@64k and downloaded and installed the newest XFree86 server (v4 beta), and glib 1.2.7 (along with the newest gtk and other fancy stuff to get the most out of X). Using the config file from this site, and changing the keyboard to `us' from `gb', and running `startx', X started right up no problem.
To get sound working I upgraded kernels (Slackware 7 comes with 2.2.13) to 2.2.15, which has support for the Maestro sound card. It comes as module support, so you have to go into /etc/modules.conf and add the alias line `alias sound maestro', and I also added in the /etc/conf.modules `path[sound]=/lib/modules/2.2.15' for good measure. After that I ran modprobe and it worked.
3COM network card on Docking Station
While I was recompiling the 2.2.15 kernel I also added the support for the 3com card in the docking station to the kernel (not as a module), as that was the only way to make it work. The 3com card I selected and got to work with no problem was `3c590/3c900 series (592/595/597) "Vortex/Boomerang" support'. I also kept the pcmcia support in there as well so the pcmcia modules would still work.
Internal 56k Modem
The internal modem I haven't gotten working yet under Linux, but I've not had time to really try yet. I imagine I'll be on the road someday and I'll have to mess with it.
Nothing else I have tried to get working yet (the IR Port, or USB)
It appears to work OK under Linux 2.2.12 to 2.2.14, but 2.2.16 causes an oops in the kernel when PPP is run.
Using XFree86 Release 4.3.0 (RH9) the trident driver works in 16bpp.
For the T7220CTe, use the 4.0.2 S3 Savage driver, or better, the latest from timr at probo.com with a suitable XF86Config file (see a sample log file). If you know how to tweak a config file, a suitable method is to generate a basic file (`XFree86 -configure :1'), and edit it to include `DefaultDepth 16' in the ``Screen'' section, and `HorizSync 27-50' in the ``Monitor'' section.
On the T7140CT and T7200CT, SuperProbe reports a Trident with signature
95401023, suggesting a `9540'.
Unfortunately the Release 3.*
XFree86 Video Card and X server list
does not mention this and
XFree86 3.* DOES NOT WORK.
Andrei Popov <andrei@3lgs.net> says that it does work if you
you compile fbdev into kernel (both 2.2.x and 2.4.0-preX).
The trident driver detects things correctly,
but even with `Options "NoDDC"', `Options "NoDDC1"' and `Options "NoDDC2"'
it appears to try to access the DDC info, the X server wedges, and the screen
blanks, and remains such even after a reboot - only a hardware reset restores the display.
# First built-in serial portThis puts i82365 at IRQ 15, and network and modem cards use IRQ 5.
exclude irq 4
# Second built-in serial port
exclude irq 3
# First built-in parallel port
exclude irq 7
# Built-in sound card
exclude irq 11
# PS/2 Mouse controller port
exclude irq 12
Old Comment: It appears that a reboot does not always bring it back, but a halt and start does.
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
/usr/X11R6/liband then run ldconfig.
/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib
