Installing Slackware Linux on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490CDT

Installing Slackware Linux 10.2 on this laptop is quite easy. In theory you should get most of it working without fiddling to much with things after the installation.

Partitioning Video Sound USB Attachments

Partitioning

Partitioning can be done very easily using cfdisk from the bootable cd. I created a swap partition of 64M and a system partition with the ext3 filesystem, that one took up the rest of the hard disk. I did this because Slackware needs around 3 gigabyte, so creating a separate home partition of one gigabyte could cause a shortage on the root partition.
After the installation I installed all the 2.6.13 kernel packages and the makeinitrd package. Then I followed the instructions to add the jbd and ext3 modules to an initial ramdisk file after which I added the new kernel to the lilo.conf file. Don't forget to chmod a+x the rc.udev file in the /etc/rc.d directory. The same procedure goes for a ReiserFS filesystem. If you are going to compile your own kernel, don't bother with all this and just enable these modules.

Video

X.Org works without problems using the VESA driver. If you would like to check out the X.Org configuration file you can find it on the bottom of this page. My laptop doesn't have enough memory to run KDE or GNOME, but Slackware lets you choose a from a whole range of window managers that require a lot less machine than the two major desktop environments. I've tried XFCE, Fluxbox and Window Maker, which I all consider to be great solutions. If you want to change your window manager at any time, just use xwmconfig. XFCE can be seen here in all the screen shots and pictures, it runs a bit slow at times but it looks very good. If you'd rather go for performance, try Blackbox or Fluxbox.
Back to contents

Sound

My laptop has a sound card which uses the Yamaha OPL-SAx chipset. Slackware has included the alsaconf tool to have the configuration done automatically. Deselect all sound cards other than Yamaha OPL-SAx to make alsaconf find it faster. PCI cards won't be found because this is an ISA card. Finding the right sound card settings can be done by alsaconf without using the probe on all ports option. If you are trying to install Red Hat you might want to try sndconfig which I remember worked fine when I installed that distribution.
Back to contents

USB

My USB stick as well as a USB mouse work fine with the 2.6.13 kernel. If you're new to Linux, here's how to mount a USB stick:
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb
Assuming it has a FAT32 filesystem. Note that in /dev/sdXX the letter and number for your device may vary. Check the /dev directory to see the available devices. The directory where you mount your USB stick has to exist before you mount it.
Back to contents