Toshiba makes a VERY FINE laptop. I would recommend a Toshiba to ANYONE who is looking to buy a new laptop. They also have very good prices on their systems. When I bought this laptop in June of 2004, Toshiba's laptop prices beat Dell, IBM, HP, and Gateway. I had no problems installing Linux on this laptop. The installation went liquid smooth and hardware was detected properly. I like this Toshiba MUCH better than the Dell Inspirion 1100 I owned. I sold it to get this Toshiba. So, if you want a good, solid laptop that is compatible with Linux, get a Toshiba Satellite.

Just installed Gentoo Linux on the A45-S121.

Everything is detected succesfully apart from a few things:

Video Card not detected and had to manually enable it via kernel.
Sound Card not detected and had to manually emerge alsa, alsa-utils, alsa-drivers, install it all then do alsamixer and unmute the items.

Everything else detected perfectly :)

Great laptop for such a cheap price

It is indeed a fine machine. Ubuntu installed on it without problems, LAN, video, sound all work without any tweaking. One problem I had was I could not use usb drives with it. After disabling `Legacy' USB support in the BIOS it started working fine. I got a wireless card to work (wn825gp) with open source drivers (bcm43xx, THANKS, guys!). The touchpad works better than in WinXP. A nice and powerful laptop. Oh, one more thing---it does not have a serial port, so I have to use a different machine for electronics stuff (like programming MCUs) but this is a minor thing.

It was indeed a fine machine. But don't bother if you plan to run Windows 7 or Ubuntu 10.04 or greater. It seems future OS development is leaving this Intel graphics chipset in the dust.