Gentoo Linux on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 2100
Gentoo Linux on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 2100
In March 2003 I got a Toshiba Satellite Pro 2100 laptop. The decision for Toshiba was made for quality and supported hardware. I also always liked the keyboard layout, except that it's a QWERTZ layout which is a bit awkward to use for programming.
After about half a year I'm still quite happy with the laptop although of course newer, faster, lighter models are available.
This is my effort at documenting my experience with an installation of Gentoo Linux (other distributions should work comparably) on the machine. What you do with that information is fully your responsibility - Use at Your Own Risk
Nov 20 2003 Last week I installed linux-2.6.0-test9 on the laptop. A few things needed updates (modutils etc.) but it basically works very nice. ACPI support is as good as with the heavily patched linux-2.4.21-pre4-acpi-preempt and even the nvidia driver works nicely. There is the occasional lock-up however that I can't trace since a) I don't have much experience in kernel hacking and b) I don't see a way to get information at the time of crash. SysReq works so at least I can sync-umount-reboot the thing. The crashes mostly occur after long periods of inactivity e.g. if I leave the machine running at night. At first I suspected the xscreensaver but even after disabling that it still hung once. I'm now running linux-2.6.0-test10 without pre-empt and I'm quite satisfied.
Jan 10 2004 A few weeks ago I briefly tried linux-2.6.0 for a few days but had some problems with the nvidia driver. There's no official support although a driver patch exists at minion.de. (The Gentoo package applies this patch automagically :-) However the X server crashed maybe once a day which I don't find acceptable so I'll wait for official driver support before I switch to 2.6.0. You can find my config at the bottom of this page.
Mar 05 2005 Attached my current xorg.conf file to the Files section at the bottom of this page.
May 14 2009 Just because it came out recently (and to see how the system behaves) I installed kubuntu 9.04 today. Comes up nicely, graphics is using the 'nv' driver out of the box, wireless works. However updating to the 'nvidia-legacy' drivers caused the usual problems: black screen with backlight; after some modprobe magic and setting the "ConnectedMonitor" option it comes up with the wrong resolution of 969x768.
Tried the usual tricks but finally went the fetch-EDID, hexedit EDID, tell Xorg to use custom-EDID route - an absolute pain. Anyway, here's a tarball with the files I had to modify (/etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf, and the EDID file). But man this is cool, 6 year old laptop and it's still very usable.
Gentoo isn't the most user-friendly to setup but the installation went (almost) without problems. Networking was detected and setup automagically using the DHCP server and DSL router. I made the mistake not to include ReiserFS in the kernel so the system didn't boot the first time but that was easily fixed. Compilation of the base system with XFree and KDE took approx. two days but that was mainly due to ACPI problems (see below).
Mar 24 2003 The keybounce can be solved with this kernel patch that unfortunately (but understandably from an engineering POV) never made it mainstream. Gotta love open source ;-)
Nov 2003 Using the linux-2.4.23 or linux-2.6 kernel it's no longer necessary to patch the kernel.
Works Using the eepro100 or the e100 kernel module.
Works Jun 27 2003 Today I got an internal WiFi card installed (Toshiba Wireless LAN Card Kit PA3212U-2MPC). The card shows up as a regular PCMCIA card so that's got to be supported by the kernel. It took me a while to get everything installed correctly since the PCMCIA handling was a bit confusing so I'll try to explain it as best as I can:
pcmcia wireless-utils and maybe airsnort or kwifimanager
pcmcia to default runlevel
The AirSnort scanner requires a patched orinoco driver. Download the current driver orinoco-0.13b.tar.gz and orinoco-0.13b-patched.diff here. You can ignore the pcmcia-cs stuff.
Unpack the driver, apply the patch and make && make install. This will overwrite the original kernel modules so you may have to repeat the install after you rebuild the kernel.
Works Using ALSA driver snd-intel8x0.
Works 1024x768; nvidia-1.0-4363
I had to add to /etc/module.conf
option nvidia NVreg_Mobile=2 NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0and to
/etc/X11/XF86Config
Section "Device"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"
to get the resolution working.
Partially works Successfully configured TwinView, but I didn't manage to activate it later on i.e. the CRT has to be connected when you boot otherwise I didn't get a picture. Also, in this case the CRT became the primary screen which is not what I would expect. Manually changing the display via the hotkey Fn-F5 doesn't currently work (as per the nvidia README). What's worse you can switch off your LCD without being able to reactivate it without a reboot.
I briefly tried to activate TV-out but it didn't work.
Dec 03 2003 By pressing F1 at startup I was able to enter the BIOS setup. There I found an option to always enable VGA output. So now I can plug in a VGA monitor anytime and run it at the laptop resolution.
Partially Works (that's probably the most you can say about ACPI4Linux at the time)
I had some initial problems with ACPI support in the Gentoo kernel: kevent and kacpid would continuously restart and consume 100% system CPU.
Mar 20 2003 Today I switched to linux-2.4.21-pre4-acpi and it works fine so far:
/proc/acpi/toshiba/fan is correct
echo 1 > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance reduces the clock-speed from 1.9GHz to 1.2GHz
I'm planning to install the software-suspend-to-disk patch but that makes it necessary to repartition the drive (to increase swap space) so I'm somewhat reluctant to do that... On the other hand the laptop supports S4Bios so maybe I just use that although it also requires available disk space and hence repartitioning.
Works Using kernel modules usbcore and usb-uhci; tested with a digital camera (Canon IXUS V2), USB memory stick, and a USB-to-serial adapter (Keyspan USA-19QW).
Not tested I don't have equipment to test with.
Not tested PCMCIA probably works w/o problems and IrDA probably isn't much of a problem. The SD-Card slot on the other hand is absolutely uncharted territory to me.
Works without any additional work. The entire arrangement of the touchpad and the buttons/wheel feels very good.
Not tested since I no longer have an analog phone line.
The laptop has a number of special keys, notably a Internet, Toshiba in front of the LCD and player-like buttons (back, play/pause, stop, fwd) on the front side. These buttons are accessible through /proc/acpi/toshiba/keys when using the toshiba_acpi module. All it needs is a user-space daemon or XFree input device. :-)
Apr 17 2003 I have written a small program to control external applications via these buttons. I'm currently using them for xmms and mplayer.
The battery life is acceptable. wmacpi tells me I have 2:25h left with a charge of 85%. This is with the system clocked down to 1.2 GHz and only editing/compiling.