S>Laptop toshiba or swap with cp

Hardware Specifications

• My Toshiba 4090XDVD laptop came with
  • Celeron 400Mhz processor
  • 128 MB RAM
  • 6GB HD
  • 14.1 inch LCD screen
  • Built-in Trident cyber 9525DVD video card
  • Built-in SBPro (Sound Blaster Pro) and WSS (Windows Sound System) compatible sound card.
  • Built-in WINModem. sigh :(
  • Xircom RealPort CardBus 10/100 Ethernet card (RBE-100)
  • Xircom RealPort 10/100+Modem 56 card (REM56G-100)

Installing Linux

• Base System
  • I installed SuSE 6.1 right out of the box. Used the entire HD for Linux. This is a Windoze-Free Laptop :)
• Upgrades (Use SuSE 6.2 and you probably won't need this)
  • I downloaded and installed the latest kernel (2.2.11)
  • Also downloaded and installed the latest PCMCIA package (3.0.14)
  • And a newer XFree86 (3.3.4) which has the latest XSVGA driver with support for the cyber 9525 graphics chip.
• BIOS Settings
  • Turn on the laptop - then quickly hit the ESC key. You will then need to hit F1 to go into SETUP mode.
  • On page two change the PC Card setting to CARDBUS/16 BIT.
  • Disable (on page one) com2 - the built-in winmodem ... it's useless.
• Verifying Card Operation
  • Use dmesg or lsmod or card_cis to verify that your card was recognized.
  • To eject/insert a new card use

    	cardctl eject 0
    	cardctl insert 0
    

• Configuring X
  • I tried using xf86config, SAX, and XF86Setup. No one was better than the other although in the end I preferred XF86Setup.
  • On more than one occasion I thought my screen would melt. It would slowly become white from a corner or side and spread throughout the entire screen. Sometimes CTRL-ALT-BKSP would kill the server - sometimes it wouldn't. The power off switch seemed not to work either. In any case at one point the power was switched off and I had to reboot and wait for fsck to do its thing. This leads me to believe that the laptop has a safety mechanism that turns it off in these conditions so the screen will not be damaged.
  • I added "Option accel" to the device section. Without it you are not using the accelerator features of the video card and you'll notice that dragging windows tends to leave a trail behind. It's much smoother if you enable accelerator mode.
  • Also the screen on the 4090 only supports acceleration if the virtual screen is set to 1024x786 resolution.
  • Here is a listing of my XF86Config file.
• The Sound Card
  • Work is in progress so check back later on for any changes.
  • Apparently the chipset is a Maestro2E. This can be verified by using the lspci command.
  • Support for this card is being worked on but is incomplete. Anyway, I wanted to try is so I downloaded and installed patch-2.2.11-ac3. This patch contains the maestro driver.
  • I recompiled the kernel (now linux-2.2.11-ac3) and sound card support as module. I also included support for OSS sound modules, 100% SB compatible cards, PCI sound blaster enabler, ESS Tech maestro chipset, and MPU-401 (not for sound blaster).
  • I then did a make modules followed by a make modules_install.
  • I made sure I had all the modules by checking /lib/modules/2.2.11-ac3/misc directory.
  • I then entered the following:

    	insmod soundcore
    	insmod sound
    	insmod uart401
    	insmod sb support=1  
    	insmod maestro
    

  • I then tried to 'cat everly.au > /dev/audio' to see if I could hear an old Everly Brothers tune. Well it worked, but the sound was awful.
  • Next (in KDE) I used the CD player to play a Neil Diamond CD. This was much better than the .au file. I couldn't get the volume up very high but at least I could now listen to my collection of 60s and 70s music on CDs.
  • Hopefully, in the near future, this driver will be completed. I'll keep checking.
• The Sound Card - Part 2
  • I downloaded another Maestro driver [in development] from people.redhat.com/zab/maestro and installed it and got MUCH better results than with the earlier driver
  • Now when I 'cat' an au file to the audio device it sounds much better
  • Also, I can now play *.mp3 files using freeamp