Satellite Pro

For the sake of the nostalgia or an interesting learning experience, have fun installing OS/2 Warp 4 on your laptop. It seems to work quite well on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490CDT. If you have any questions regarding this guide, just use the contact form on this website.

Partitioning Pre-installation Video Sound Miscellaneous Attachments

Partitioning

I installed OS/2 Warp 4 using the three diskettes to get the installation started from the installation cd. Before starting the installation I turned my Unix partitions into several FAT16 partitions (due to the 2GB size limit) using fdisk from a DOS boot diskette, so the Warp installer would be able to read them. I also erased the MBR using fdisk /mbr. From within the Warp installer I was then able to create two partitions. One primary, 500 MB partition for the OS and a logical (within extended) partition to be used for data storage. Warp only uses about 150 megabytes after a default installation, by the way. I chose HPFS (which was apparently also developed by Microsoft when it was still holding hands with IBM) to be used as the file system type for both of the partitions. After creating these partitions the installer required me to restart the computer and the installation process.
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Pre-installation

After the installation, the loading of the Sound Blaster Pro device driver which was selected by default wasn't loaded and an error was displayed. If you run into this you can just remove a line from the config.sys file, but you should just select the following devices during installation:

• Video: "Video Graphics Array (VGA)"
• Multimedia Device Support: "None" (This is the sound card)

I also selected no network adapter since I had none. APM support is switched on in the next screen, this is a good thing since it actually works for battery monitoring. After installing OS/2 you can install the proper drivers.
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Video

To install the S3 ViRGE video card you can get a proper driver from the Toshiba website (go to the download section and select "archive models". As the readme file instructs, you need to extract the download to a FAT formatted diskette and label it "S3 DRV1". For your convenience I have added a floppy image at the bottom of this page.

Once the OS/2 system has the diskette with the driver loaded, click on the icon OS/2 System, click Command Prompts and click OS/2 Window. You can also use the drop down menu in the default tray (the bar at the top of the screen). Type a: and press enter to change your directory to the diskette drive and execute setup.

The setup will install the video driver for you, after which you can reboot and select the screen resolution and reboot once more. Click on the icon OS/2 System again, then System Setup, followed by the System icon, then select the first tab Screen. Anything sized 1024x768 will result in a virtual desktop in which you have to scroll to see another part of the desktop. 800x600x16777216 colours will work, but I had to select 65536 colours to have my 24-bit background JPEG image displayed properly.
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Sound

Before trying to install a sound card driver, check your BIOS settings (on system start press ESC and then F1). On the second page of the BIOS settings set the sound card settings like they look in the picture, then after the installation of the driver, try to keep to these settings again when configuring the software.

On the same page where the video driver is available, an OS/2 Yamaha OPL3-SAx sound driver can be downloaded for this laptop. Once again, the contents of the file need to be extracted to a FAT formatted diskette (you can use the diskette image at the bottom of this page). After inserting the disk, click the OS/2 System icon again, then click the Command Prompts icon and finally the OS/2 Window icon. Change the drive letter to A again by typing a: and pressing enter. This time enter the command minstall. In the window that appears, select Yamaha OPL3-SA Series Audio Adapter. Configure the driver and click install and answer yes to have the program alter the config.sys file.
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Miscellaneous

• If you only happened to have a diskette drive to transfer files (and don't want to waste a cd), you might want to compress some files with zip. To unzip them again on OS/2, you will need an unzip program. To save you some trouble, I attached an unzip program at the bottom of this page.
• If you're wondering how to take a screen shot in OS/2, try using the PM Camera/2 program listed below. It can save "screen dumps" to bitmap and postscript format.
• If your second partition isn't formatted yet after installation, execute format d: /FS:HPFS to make it a proper, recognised HPFS partition.
• A few last things: it had been a while since I used DOS commands. Remember, ls is dir, rm is del, and mv is move or ren. Also, watch the slashes in the file path.

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A while ago I installed FreeBSD 5.3 on this Satellite 490CDT, back then I only got X working. This time I had more luck using two discs containing FreeBSD 6.0.

Partitioning Video Sound USB Miscellaneous Attachments

Partitioning

FreeBSD needs a primary partition because it can't cope with (DOS) extended partitions (at least not that I know of). FreeBSD partitions can be created inside this primary partition. When I installed FreeBSD 5.3 I created a swap partition and a system partition, that seemed to work fine. This time I let the installer do the partitioning. It created a 520M root partition, a 520M /tmp partition, a 1.8G /usr partition and a 1.1G /var partition. The system has 39M of swap space.
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Video

Getting X.Org to work wasn't too easy. No configuration file was created yet so I tried Xorg -configure. This completely locked up my laptop (not even keyboard response). If this happens xorgconfig is the way to go. This is a script which is the same as the xf86config that comes with XFree86. Eventually X worked using the VESA driver at a proper 800x600 size. If you would like to look at or use the configuration file that was generated by the script you can find it on the bottom of this page. I was able to select the window manager by creating .xinitrc containing the line exec /usr/X11R6/bin/wmaker in my home directory, or by editing /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc and adding the wmaker command there. Detailed instructions on this and also on getting X loaded during startup can be found here.
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Sound

Getting sound out of this laptop with FreeBSD was easier than I thought. I'm not sure if it really matters, but if you're in doubt about the configuration of your sound card in the BIOS, copy the settings from the picture.

To load the module for the Yamaha OPL3-SAx card use the command kldload snd_mss. Use kldunload snd_mss to unload it again. To have it loaded on startup, add the line snd_mss_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.

I couldn't find XMMS on the FreeBSD 6 installation discs, so I downloaded it from the official website and waited for it compile for an hour, which was apparently worth it. XMMS played mp3 files using the OSS or eSound interface.
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USB

I was able to use a USB mouse in the console and in X without any further effort. My USB stick was also recognised, but I had to find out the FreeBSD way of mounting devices first. The USB port was a SCSI device, these devices start with da in FreeBSD. I needed to mount SCSI disk 0, partition (slice) 1. The FAT32 filesystem seems to be called msdosfs on FreeBSD. In a mount command this information is processed as follows:
mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb
I also added a line to fstab to make the mounting process easier (see attachments).
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Miscellaneous

• In Window Maker it's possible to set the background using wmsetbg -s -u filename.jpg.
• Shutting the system down is done a little different from the Linux shutdown command. In stead of using -h for halt I had to use shutdown -p now to shutdown and completely power off the system (doesn't happen with -h).

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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.
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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.
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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.
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