Linux on a Toshiba Satellite 3005-S303

The Toshiba Satellite 3000 and 3005 series notebooks were released in 2001, and are a good compromise between weight, usability, and feature set. I feel that most Linux users will find them a good addition to their mobile toolkit.

Newer models have integrated 802.11b (Wi-Fi) and come pre-installed with Windows XP. The model I purchased, the 3005-S303, comes with neither, but does have an impressive feature set:

I purchased mine from eBay for about $1,350 in late November. The seller did a system restore, and the system came with Windows ME installed. Initial impressions were good. The screen was bright and didn't give me gradients when I viewed it straight on like my old Sony PCG-F540 did. The DVD playback worked, although I couldn't get it to playback on the S-Video port on the rear of the unit. CD burning worked. I downloaded a copy of Windows 2000 Professional from my file server using the built-in Ethernet (which is a Realtek 8139 chip) and burned it using Adaptec Easy-CD Creator 4.

I installed Windows 2000 professional in a 3072MB partition (for work reasons) after blowing away the Windows ME partition. The installation didn't give me any hassles, except that you have to remember to remove the CD after the first reboot so that it will boot from the hard drive. After booting into the GUI portion of the Win2k install, it will prompt you to re-insert the CD. About halfway through the "Installing Devices" portion of the Win2k installation, the install will halt for about a minute and then the screen will flicker rapidly for what may seem to be an abnormally long period. The flickering will eventually stop and the install will resume. Total time for install is 25 minutes.

Another reboot, and you're in Windows 2000. It will detect the network card, but not the video drivers. Go to toshiba.com, select "portables", "service and support", "support center", "tech support center", and then select the model of your laptop. Download all the drivers for Windows 2000 and install them. You don't have to screw around in Device Manager, though. Toshiba's driver packages are pretty good; you just double-click on the driver package, click setup, and the driver install goes on autopilot. Each package will tell you in big red letters to reboot now, but you can wait until after you've installed all the driver packages.

Reboot number 3, and things should pop up in 16-bit, 1024x768, alpha-blended lickableness. I missed the sound driver the first time, so I installed it here, and noticed that the post-install screen said that I should reboot my computer twice. Ok...

Reboot number 4, and the sound driver looked ok- the yellow speaker icon was in the tray. Fired up Outlook Express and grabbed a mail that had a wave file attached (I develop IVR systems for OST and a client had sent some new prompts to be integrated into a system). Outlook Express does IMAP pretty well. Last night I had gotten the courier-imap port running on my big coloed FreeBSD box, shaitan. Outlook Express set all the flags properly, so opening my mailbox up in mutt before and after I got the mail headers in OE showed the flags set properly. The sound file played fine. About 55 minutes into the install by now. Went to Windows Update to go download critical updates, about 10 megs worth. Ouch. Some of the updates didn't take, though.

Reboot number 5, and the system beep has changed from coming from being a PC speaker "BREEP" to the standard Windows "ding!". I suppose two reboots were necessary. It's time to install Service Pack 2 and see if that includes the update that wouldn't install from the Critical Updates package. SP2 setup wanted to download about 20MB of stuff, so I got a glass of wine and tried to figure out why courier-imap wants all my subfolders of Maildir to start with a period (a la ".Trash/", ".sent/", ".spam/") before it will tell IMAP clients that they exist.

I don't know what people are talking about, AT&T Broadband service is giving me a full 1.5Mbps. The 20MB downloaded in about 80 seconds. I'm 16 hops away and going through AT&T to UU/AlterNet to get there, but the throughput hits the ceiling on the rate limit AT&T's using at their edge router.

Reboot number 6, and the Critical Update package installs properly now. One of the updates was for the nasty HTTP request vulnerability

Reboot number 7, and there's 6 more security updates, Windows Critical Update Notification, a new set of SSL public keys, 3 drivers, and a compatibility update (for games, it looks like) to download. Everything installs fine.

Reboot number 8 (and I thought people were exaggerating about this excessive reboot thing) and nothing's broken yet. Went to microsoft.com/security and ordered the security toolkit CD. Made the tab-completion registry change. You can do it yourself by pasting this into a foo.reg file on the windows machine and merging it in:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"CompletionChar"=dword:00000009

It's time to install cygwin! I'm so happy :) About halfway though their silly install interface, the windows critical update notification utility pops up a window saying that there's more stuff to download. Huh? Oh, it wants me to install IE5.5SP2. Ok, fine, I'll do that. NT emacs is at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/latest. Swapped the control and caps lock key using the Scancode Map trick. Ran ssh-host-config in cygwin to set up ssh.

Reboot number 9. IE 5.5 installed ok. More applications: WinDVD, Easy CD Creator, Office. Eh, the control key is locked. Backed out the control <-> caps lock change and rebooted.

Reboot number 10. More apps: Acrobat, Quicktime, RealONE. RealONE (used to be Real Player) requires registration now. Hmm, the driver update for the sound card broke it. *sigh* Reinstalled the old driver.

Reboot number 12. Activestate Perl (for the Win32::x modules and Explorer shell extensions). Logged in as the normal user account instead of Administrator, confirmed the apps work fine. Now 2:45 into the install. Total space used 1.7GB.

Now that I just wasted 3 hours doing that, let's install Debian. I created primary partition 2 for root (4096MB), and configured the rest of the space as a big logical partition with a 300MB swap partition

Debian doesn't have drivers built into the kernel on the CD for the rtl8139. During the post-install configuration, I had to switch to tty2 and manually insmod it and configure it (using pump) before the setup utility could update the apt sources list.

Edited /etc/apt/sources.list to upgrade to testing. apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, find out that libc6 has a problem. apt-get -f install libc6. apt-get upgrade. While we're waiting for that to complete, let's have a look at the kernel boot messages to see what we've got here:

apt-get -f install util-linux, apt-get upgrade, apt-get -f install apt, apt-get upgrade, apt-get -f install exim, apt-get -f install ppp, apt-get -f install netbase, apt-get -f install libpam-modules, apt-get -f install groff, apt-get -f install klogd, whee! apt-get install x-window-system, apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.16-686, vi /etc/lilo.conf, apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.16-686, apt-get install less, pop the CD, reboot.

echo -e 'eth0\t\t8139too' >> /etc/modutils/aliases, echo 'iface eth0 inet dhcp' >> /etc/network/interfaces, update-modules, apt-get install lynx, go to NVidia's site, download the drivers, apt-get install make, untar the drivers, cd ~/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-2313, make. apt-get install kernel-headers-2.4.16-686, cd ~/NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-2314, apt-get install gcc, make SYSINCLUDE=/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.4.16-686/include. Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and set the driver to "nvidia" instead of "nv". apt-get install kdebase, apt-get install kdm, /etc/init.d/kdm start.

apt-get install mozilla-browser, apt-get install msttcorefonts, edit all the X server config files so I get 72dpi,

Hmm, the OSS drivers for the sound card don't work. Let's try ALSA instead... that works great!