PROCESSOR(1) Intel Pentium 166 Mhz (1.8V/2.5V) w/MMX
Integrated Coprocessor: Yes
Processor Cache 32KB: (16KB code; 16KB data)
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MEMORY: 64Mbit EDO DRAM, 3.3V
Standard/Maximum: 32MB/64MB
Speed: 60ns
Hyper Page mode memory access: Yes
Data width: 64 bit
Local Bus Clock Speed: 66 MHz
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BIOS (4Mbit FLASH EPROM): 512KB
Supported Standards: APM v.1.2; ACPI; PnP 1.0a; VESA v2.0; DPMS, DCC, DMI v.2.0
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SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE Connecting Devices
PCI Local Bus: (32-bit, 33Mhz) BIOS ROM, KBC, HDD, Sound chip
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DISPLAY
Type: TFT Active Matrix Color (800 x 480 resolution)
Size: 7.1” Diagonal
Dot Pitch: 0.19mm x 0.19mm
Contrast Ratio: 100:1 (min)
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VIDEO
Memory: 2 MB (integrated into Controller chip)
Speed: 50ns
Hyper Page mode support: Yes
Controller Chip: NeoMagic NM2160
Data Bus Width: 128-bit
PCI Local Bus: Yes, 32-bit, 33 MHz
Graphics Accelerator: Yes, Supports BitBLT, H/W Cursor, Scaling
Digital Video Accelerator: Yes
YUV-to-RGB color space conversion: Yes
Color Pallette: Up to 16.7M colors
INTERNAL VIDEO SUPPORT Colors Refresh Rate (Non-Interlaced)
Smaller Image 640 x 480 24-bit (16.7M) N/A
Full Screen 800 x 480 24-bit (16.7M) N/A
Virtual Display Mode 800 x 600 24-bit (16.7M) N/A
Virtual Display Mode 1024 x 768 16-bit (64K) N/A
EXTERNAL VIDEO SUPPORT (CRT) Colors Refresh Rate (Non-Interlaced)
640 x 480 24-bit (16.7M) 85 Hz
800 x 480 24-bit (16.7M) 85 Hz
800 x 600 24-bit (16.7M) 85 Hz
1024 x 768 16-bit (64K) 75 Hz
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STORAGE
HDD (2.5" Enhanced IDE) -- Fixed 2.1 Billion bytes = 2.02 GB (13 msec) with 128KB buffer
FDD (3.5" 1.44MB) Bundled: (Includes PC Card and FDD)
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KEYBOARD
80keys with Windows 95 support: Yes (15mm key pitch; 1.5 mm Travel)
12 dedicated function keys: Yes
Cursor control (8 Keys, Inverted "T"): Yes
Integrated Pointing Device: AccuPoint (Right of LCD display)
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EXPANSION SLOTS
Two Stacked PC Card Slot: Yes (CardBus & ZV Card Ready)
32-bit, 3.3V PC CardBus Support: Yes
16-bit, 5.0V PC Card Support: Yes
Internal Memory Slot (One only): Yes
(Uses 0.25 micron technology.)
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EXPANSION PORTS LOCATION
One Headphone(2.5mm mini jack, stereo,16 min) Yes: Rear of unit
One Microphone jack (2.5mm mini jack, monaural) Yes: Rear of unit
One DC input Yes: Right side of unit
One FIR Infrared port (IrDA1.1:4Mbps) Yes: Right side of unit
I/O BAR (Port Expander) (1) Standard: Connects 100-pin to expansion bus -- rear of unit
One 9-Pin Serial (16550 UART compliant) Yes
One 25-Pin Parallel (IEEE P1284 compliant) Yes (8 bit ECP)
One 15-Pin RGB (SVGA video) Yes
One PS2 Mouse/Keyboard port Yes
Dimensions/Weight 8.27 L x 2.38 W x 1.38 D --- .37 lbs.
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POWER
Autosensing External AC Adapter: PA2501U 3.94’’L x 1.97’’W x .98D’’--- .46 lbs
Input (Voltage/Frequency) 100-240V; 50-60Hz
Output (Voltage/Amps) 15 VDC; 2.0A
Power Output (Watts) 30W
MaxTime Power Management: Yes
Battery (High Capacity Battery -- Included) Part# PA2503U Not compatible with Libretto 50/70CT battery
Type: Li-Ion (2400mAh)
Dimensions 8.27 L x 1.78 W x .8 H
Weight .61 lbs.
Battery Life (Full Power/Low Power) 2.5hrs/3.5-4 hrs.
Recharge Time (Computer Off/On) 6 hrs. / 16 hrs.
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SOUND SYSTEM
Chipsets: Yamaha OPL3 SA3
16-bit stereo playback Yes
Maximum Sampling Rate 44.1 kHz
FM Synthesis support Yes
Built-in Speaker Yes (monaural) -- right of LCD display
Half-duplex support Yes
3D Sound support Yes (when connected to stereo speakers)
Sound formats supported: SoundBlaster Pro v.3.01, MIDI
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ENHANCED PORT REPLICATOR(Optional ) Part# PA2719U 8.98 L x 6.48 W x 1.91 D
One 9-Pin Serial (16550 UART compliant) Yes
One 25-Pin Parallel (8 bit ECP) Yes
One 15-pin RGB port Yes
One (PS/2) 101 Keyboard Yes
One (PS/2) Mouse port Yes
One Universal Serial Bus (USB) Yes
Two PC Card Slots (One stacked, one single) Left Slot: (1) Type I or II Right Slot: (2) Type I or II; or (1) Type III
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DIMENSIONS 8.27"L x 5.19"W x 1.38 H
WEIGHT (Includes .33 lbs. standard battery) 2.4 Lbs.
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BUNDLED SOFTWARE: Windows 95; Mediamatics Arcade Pak; Intel Indeo Video;
Yamaha Audio Rack; Puma IntelliSync 97; Microsoft Internet Explorer; Fn-esse; Online manual
SECURITY Power-on, & supervisor password
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WARRANTY 1 YR Parts & Labor
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ENVIRONMENTAL SPECIFICATIONS Operating / Non-operating
Temperature 41°F (5°C) to 95°F (35°C) -4°F (-20°C) to 149°F (65°C)
Thermal Gradient: 15º C per hour (max.) N/A N/A
Relative Humidity 20% to 80% non-condensing 10% to 80% non-condensing
Altitude: -197 to 9,843ft. (-60 to 3000m) -197 to 32,808ft. (-60 to 10,000m)
Shock: 10G 60G
Vibration: 0.5G 1.0G
------------------------------------------------
Those are the official system descriptions from Toshiba.
My configuration:
Toshiba Libretto 100CT, 64MB RAM, 10GB harddrive, PCMCIA FDD drive, Enhanced Port Replicator, Xircom Creditcard 10/100 Ethernet + Modem 56 PCMCIA Global Access card (CEM56-100) and a 3000mAh Li-Ion battery. apart from that, all is standard issue.
Operating system of choice: Mandrake 9.0 Powerpack Edition, no updates or other software that did not come on the 7 disks.
Window manager: KDE for root, and for the primary account I use Blackbox.
How to install: There are several ways, depending on your available hardware. For me the Xircom card proved to be a real gem, as Mandrake 9.0 supports this card out of the box with the pcmcia.img floppy image, to boot into the installer, which can then be loaded from the network from an Apache webserver that has all the cd's contents available. very easy install for me indeed, but I needed the extra 32MB RAM to accomplish that. once the installation is started, sit back and wait.. :)
The only parts I do not have working 100% are the Extended Port Replicator (System hangs when trying to load USB/PCMCIA for some reason when it is docked and powered, in my case. Probably fixable but I lack the skill for that), The soundcard needs manual setup after installing after which it works OK in most applications, and the LCD screen is at a default 800x600, which is ofcourse a little awkward since physically it can display 800x480, and the hardware emulates 800x600. So it does work, but you miss a small bar of the screen at the bottom. This is fixable if you know how to alter X's config files with the proper ModeLines.
Power management with APM is a little awkward, you'll need to google around for tips on how to tweak it to your specific needs (it is harddisk size dependant, sadly. The Libretto has a BIOS 'limit' of 8GB that can badly interfere with APM and suspend to disk from Linux, it wipes a part of the disk the size of the installed RAM when you use apm --suspend, and ofcourse that way damages your data. it is recoverable, but by reinstalling your OS... you need to make a suspend partition to be safe, or leave APM alone.)
Boots a little slow when you load it with a lot of software, but that is to be expected. The real bootup time hogs are big things like Postfix, CUPS and the DevFS daemon.
Take out the stuff you really don't need and you have one very stable Libretto running Linux!
(This listing is from the -undocked- Libretto 100CT):
[root@Libretto sbin]# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems 601 (rev 2e)
00:04.0 VGA compatible controller: Neomagic Corporation NM2160 [MagicGraph 128XD] (rev 01)
00:11.0 Communication controller: Toshiba America Info Systems FIR Port (rev 22)
00:13.0 Cardbus bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems ToPIC97 (rev 20)
00:13.1 Cardbus bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems ToPIC97 (rev 20)
I'm writing this review because I noticed there were some things I wanted to include in my HCL entry, but couldn't because you can't edit it once it's uploaded... ;)
Side note, the price paid I listed comprises both the price I paid for the hardware and the software (Mandrake Powerpack)
The price is also converted from Euro to Dollar, so there's probably a bit of slack in there somewhere. your mileage may vary, I got my Libretto very cheap compared to the ones you sometimes see on Ebay...
Points: 8 out of 10, since some tweaking was required and the Extended Port replicator seems to throw a wrench in the works after the initial setup. apart from that, it appears the Libretto 100CT works just fine under Linux.
Caveats, there's some tricky business going on when you want to install Mandrake 9.0 to this technological wonder, and i'll list them for you.
1. Installation: Done by me by means of a Xircom PCMCIA Ethernet card, which is supported by the pcmcia floppy image found on the first Mandrake CD. The install method I chose was HTTP, since i've had some major problems with NFS and FTP not working for some reason. HTTP worked like lightning, but the caveat here is that your Libretto needs to have 64MB of RAM to make this work. Make sure that before you start the installation, you have all your desired hardware hooked up to the Libretto. this eases the entry into the Linux world for your Libretto since all hardware is detected and configured during installation, and ofcourse since all drivers and disks are available during installation..
2. Hardware configuration: Pretty straightforward except you have to watch out when you configure the screen, you should choose a "Generic 800x600 Flatpanel" for your display, so you can at least have a decent sized display when you boot X and a perfect screen when you go into text mode. Since the exotic hardware on the Libretto 100CT has a function where it emulates 800x600 pixels on a screen that is physicly only capable of displaying 800x480, you'll notice that a small 1.5 inch ribbon of your display area will appear 'lost' to the underside of the display. Virtually it is there, but you just can't see it. You need to edit the X config files with the proper ModeLines to get X to display at 800x480 pixels properly. Then the Extended Port Replicator. this is a little awkward, since during the installation everything was fine, but once I wanted to do the first bootup with the Libretto on the Port Replicator with the power adapter attached to the replicator, the Libretto locked up when trying to load USB/PCMCIA. I could not get past that point without removing the Libretto from the Port Replicator or the power adapter. Seemingly there is something about the Extended Port Replicator that does get recognized by Linux, but is malconfigured afterwards. I haven't yet figured out what the problem is exactly. Obviously the replicator doesn't work properly without the power adapter attached.. so this is where the Compatibility lost one point towards a full 10 ;)
Sound, I had to manually configure a Soundblaster Pro with sndconfig after installation to get sound to work and loaded during bootup. the settings for the hardware addresses can be found in the Libretto's BIOS, on the second page. The harddisk, here is another tricky part you need to take care of (or not, your choice), the Libretto's BIOS has a 'limitation' where it can only see harddisks that are 8GB or less in size. this 'limitation', only influences how the Libretto's BIOS handles hibernation, specifically suspend to disk functions. When you do apm --suspend from Linux in the default configuration, the APM daemon will call the Libretto's BIOS APM suspend to disk function, after which the Libretto kindly proceeds to execute your command by dumping the entire contents of RAM directly to the harddisk. Now, the 'limitation' bit again. The Libretto will think it has a 8GB harddisk installed if you have a disk that is equal or larger than 8GB, and will try to write to the 'end' of this 8GB limit. If you have a 10GB hdd like me, the apm --suspend will blow a hole somewhere in your Linux filesystem and render your installation useless. (Insert laughter here, since I experienced this phenomenon first hand!) So you either need to leave apm --suspend alone, or you make a suspend partition somewhere between 7.8GB and 8.1GB (you only need a little more than 64MB). Me, I just won't touch APM anymore since I won't use it anyway. You'll have to google around a bit to find specific instructions for your own harddisk, since the location for the suspend partition is dependant on the size of the entire harddisk (yes I know, very annoying). But the plus part, while the BIOS only 'sees' 8GB or less, you can still use larger disks, since they will work flawlessly and Linux also gets to see all of the disk since it doesn't use BIOS to work with the disk.
3. Usage and overall compatibility:
I'd say the Libretto 100CT is decently supported by Mandrake 9.0, the Xircom card really helped a bunch and the system just overall performs just as expected for a 166Mhz, 64MB system running X. Starting applications takes a little thinking for the Libretto, but once started, it's started. You might want to keep the screen color depth to 16 bits however, although the hardware supports 32 bit color the Libretto needs a lot more thinking time in Linux to work with that setting. on 16 bit color everything still looks perfectly good, and just as smooth. but faster ;)
Perhaps with a little tweaking of the X config files it is possible to enable hardware acceleration on the Libretto's NeoMagic chipset, however with only 2MB of video ram I guess the results would be minimal, but i'd have to try and find that out somehow. If you like to have a full fledged desktop with icons and such, I can recommend KDE as it can be tweaked in almost every way to suit your needs, and seems to work well on the Libretto with 64MB RAM. it'd be slightly heavy on the memory, however. For something lighter, Blackbox or Fluxbox is definately recommended.
Overall i'm pretty happy with my Libretto like this, everything seems to be workable and running, there's no worry for viruses or malware (I wouldn't be able to run any decent anti-virus or firewall software on the Libretto in Windows today! much too heavy on the processor!) and it's a nice companion when I go to work :)
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