Toshiba

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.
Back to contents

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.
Back to contents

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.
Back to contents

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.
Back to contents

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.

Back to contents

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.
Back to contents

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.
Back to contents

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.
Back to contents

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).
Back to contents

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).

Back to contents

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

At first I installed Slackware 10.1 on the Tecra M2, but when Slackware 10.2 was made available I decided to reinstall because I wanted to have different partition sizes. I got everything to work pretty well with the 2.6.16.16 kernel, including ACPI, which probably took most of the effort. I got a lot of info from the pages listed on the bottom. Model specific info: PM 745/512/60G54/14XT/DS/LM/W. This page is listed on TuxMobil.

01/08/07 Notice: although I wrote this guide installing Slackware 10, it still works about the same way with Slackware 12. I'm using kernel version 2.6.18 in stead of the default, because I encountered problems getting suspend to memory to work properly. You can have a look at my 2.6.18 config file, but I have patched the source to work with the bootsplash screen, so if you want to use it verbatim, you'll have to install that too (bootsplash package available on LinuxPackages.net).

Partitioning Wireless network Internal modem Graphics DVD player/ writer Touchpad and accupoint Special keys ACPI (and such) Sound, temperature and the fan Status (what works) Attachments

Partitioning

I removed all existing data on the hard disk. I created a partition table looking like this:

The root partition contains the system, the games and the additional programs. The home partition is intended for documents and media. I didn't create a swap partition, but decided to go with a swap file. This way I can increase and decrease the swap space as I please.
Back to contents

Wireless network

To use the Wireless network the driver, the firmware and the ieee80211 subsystem are needed from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/ and http://ieee80211.sourceforge.net/ respectively, unless you are using one of the newer kernels (I think post 2.6.14), because the ipw2200 driver and ieee80211 subsystem are included in those.

Next you need to make sure the right options are enabled in the kernel configuration:
CONFIG_NET_RADIO=y
CONFIG_FW_LOADER=y
CONFIG_CRYPTO=y

You can then compile the drivers using the usual make and make install. Don't forget to copy the *.fw files to the /lib/firmware/ directory. Be sure that the module is loaded and edit your network configuration files accordingly. In Slackware this means /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf, and if you are using an encryption key you'll need to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf. You could also use KWiFiManager to take care of this.
Back to contents

Internal modem

Although using a dial-up connection may be next to obsolete, it can very well be used as an emergency option in case of no broadband. First get the most recent version of the SmartLink drivers. They should compile and install fine using make and make install. The drivers used to compile fine for me, but since I started using kernel 2.6.16.16 I got a make error because the usb version of the driver wouldn't compile. The internal modem driver will however compile and install successfully if the usb related parts are removed from drivers/Makefile. You could try my modified version (see attachments) of the source files if you encounter this problem.

Once the drivers and the executable are installed, the driver needs to be loaded (modprobe slamr). Make creates the device in the /dev directory, but if you restart your laptop and are using udev, the device will disappear. Execute mknod -m 600 /dev/slamr0 c 242 0 to recreate the device. If everything works /sbin/slmodemd will be started without error messages. The modem can then be used with wvdial or kppp. After googling I found out that I needed to lower the baud rate to 24000 and add the init string AT+MS=34 for the modem to work properly. wvdial Also needs Carrier Check = no in the wvdial.conf file. Take a look at my configuration file (see attachments) if you need an example. I haven't made an attempt at making the modem sound work yet because that's not a priority to me.
Back to contents

Graphics

Making the NVIDIA card work is easy, just get the most recent NVIDIA driver and add the proper line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf (see attachments):

Driver "nvidia"
And optionally:
Option "NoLogo"

I get about 2350 FPS running glxgears while running KDE and 2400 FPS without running KDE. Also the external video port works when a monitor is connected to it, though it shows the laptop's original 1024x768 screensize in stead of the 1280x1024 that it can do, this can be fixed by modifying the xorg.conf file. I'm not sure how to switch between the laptop screen and the external monitor (manipulating /proc/acpi/toshiba/video doesn't work for me), but restarting X does the trick.
Back to contents

DVD player/ writer

At first I wasn't able to play DVD's using Xine, although I did install libdvdcss. I couldn't figure out what went wrong until I got a hint from Susanna Gross. Apparently because I hadn't played DVD's from Windows, the DVD region hadn't been set either. Setting the region was easily done using regionset. Be sure to install the NVIDIA driver as well because DVD's will play very slowly without it.

For Slackware 10.1: K3b won't notice the writer when using it as a user and not root. If the user is added to the group 'cdrom', the writer is shown in K3b. If this doesn't help try editing /etc/udev/permissions.d/udev.permissions, checking the optical devices section.
Back to contents

Touchpad and accupoint

The touchpad and the accupoint work fine after Slackware's default installation, but to enable scrolling and special actions for the corners, the Synaptics touchpad driver must be installed. To install it just extract, make, make install and modify the xorg.conf file. The module section needs to be modified and a new input device needs to be added, check my Xorg config file (see attachments) or the documentation that comes with the tar file to find out how. I stuck to the 2.6.14.7 kernel for a while until I tried 2.6.16.16, because between those the touchpad driver just didn't make anything scroll.
Back to contents

Special keys

By installing FnFX I got the keys to do this:
I-button (next to the power button): Start Firefox.
Monitor-switch-button (next to the I-button): Start Kontact.
Fn-ESC: Mute/ unmute sound.
Fn-F1: Lock KDE session (start screensaver).
Fn-F2: Log off.
Fn-F3: Suspend to memory (by starting a script).
Fn-F4: Reboot.
Fn-F5: Toggle fan on/ off.
Fn-F6: Decrease screen brightness.
Fn-F7: Increase screen brightness.
Fn-F8: Decrease mixer volume.
Fn-F9: Increase mixer volume.
Back to contents

ACPI (and such)

Since kernel 2.6.16.16 suspend to memory has been working perfectly. When I tried to use it with kernels 2.6.12 and 2.6.14 the tty's got messed up, this might have been solved because I now use a newer NVidia driver. I put the laptop to sleep by pressing Fn+F3 (see above) or by closing the lid. Closing the lid envokes /etc/acpi/acpi_handler.sh (see attachments), in which I specified to execute echo mem > /sys/power/state (alternatively you can do echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep). The acpi_handler.sh also creates a temporary file. If I press the power button it checks if the file exists. If it does, the computer just wakes up. If the computer isn't waking up and I press the power button it doesn't find the file, thus the computer starts the shutdown script.

I also added a line to kill FnFX before suspending, because for some reason the FnFX starts the program for whichever hotkey I pressed last before suspending. FnFX also crashes for reasons unknown to me as of yet, so I wrote a tiny script (see attachments) which I put in ~/.kde/autostart/ to let it be executed during KDE startup. It checks every 5 seconds to see if FnFX is still running and if it isn't (for instance because the laptop killed FnFX before suspending), it starts a new instance of the program.

I added a line in the acpi_handler.sh script below the suspend command to prevent the hard drive from spinning down, which makes an annoying clicking sound. I also let this command be executed at boot time, but suspending resets the value that is set by the command.

If you are using Linux 2.6.12.6 (or an earlier version), the touchpad and accupoint will stop working after wakeup. I got a hint from Matthias Kattanek that there was an existing bugreport. It turned out that "==" had to be replaced with "&" in alps.c to fix this.

The Centrino "performance profiles" work fine. When I set "powersave" as the performance profile with KLaptop, the processor speed drops down to 600MHz and the battery lasts for three hours at most if it's fully charged. The profiles (or governors as they are called in the kernel setup) "conservative" and "ondemand" change the cpu speed depending on what I'm doing. For instance if I start a program that requires some calculating, the processor speed is increased, as well as the power drain.

I tried to use suspend2 with a number of different kernel versions, and it sort of worked both using a swap partition or the filewriter. I never got it to work properly with the NVidia drivers, but this is alright since suspend to memory is working so well.

Finally, if you experience problems rebooting the laptop, try adding rmmod ipw2200 somewhere in the rc.0 script to unload the wireless network module before a restart.
Back to contents

Sound, temperature and the fan

Sound: Enable CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0 in the kernel config file for the sound card. I disabled CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0M (modem) otherwise the sound didn't work. The other sound card drivers aren't necessary, so I disabled them as well. After the kernel is installed, the sound can be configured with alsaconf. Be sure to disable "Headphone Jack Sense" with any mixer to actually get sound.

Temperature: The current temperature measured in the laptop is readable from the file /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature. I created a SuperKaramba theme to display the current temperature (together with other statistics) on the desktop.

Fan: It's possible to enable, disable or check the status of the fan by manipulating /proc/acpi/toshiba/fan. I set FnFX to do this at the push of a button (well, two buttons).
Back to contents

Status

Tested and working: wireless network interface, normal network interface, internal modem, video acceleration, cd writing, dvd writing, dvd playing, touchpad, accupoint, Toshiba keys, Fn keys, power button, lid switch, suspend to memory, sound output, internal microphone, external microphone, pcmcia (modem card and network card detected). Also a usb stick and a Logitech Quickcam (usb) function properly.
Not tested: sd card, parralel port, firewire, s-video out.
Back to contents