***Harddrive: check http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=171059 to see my "issues" with the harddrive under a pre-2.6.10 kernel. Upgrade to 2.6.10 if your harddrive seems to go slower and slower the longer your computer stays on (the laptop was running WinXP before and the harddrive totally died on it, but that was most likely a production error, I got that HD swapped in five minutes by the very nice people at the local toshiba support shop).
***Wireless: Bit of a problem there, maybe getting all the up2dates off the net first would've made things easier on me. The card wouldn't activate and only showed as an Intersil PRISM ethernet card, not as a wireless in Fedora's network-program. With some help ( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=279488 ) I managed to find what my card was on using cardctl ident and loaded the right modules. Posting wildly from my LQ-thread:
cardctl ident gives this:
Code:
Socket 0:
product info: "TOSHIBA", "Wireless LAN Card", "Version 01.01", ""
manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
function: 6 (network)
Socket 1:
no product info available
(the following is from 2gnu) It's listed as a generic Prism card in the config file that comes with the latest orinoco_cs drivers, which are also included in the Linux kernel if wireless support is enabled.
This entry in /etc/pcmcia/config should tell your system to use that driver.
Code:
card "Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps Wireless Adapter"
manfid 0x0156, 0x0002
bind "orinoco_cs"
To manually load the module, modprobe hermes orinoco orinoco_cs (I modprobed only orinoco_cs)
Then use iwconfig to set the card parameters.
That got the card activated. I haven't gotten a chance to bring it to the wifi-network to try it out yet though ;)
Other than that, I had no (HW-related) problems. Works like a ... like a thing that Just Works.
EDIT (putting this here so as not to mess up the "average price"-thing):
Just wanted to add that Ubuntu Hoary works on it too :-)
I had some hardware errors before due to what seemed to be a range of defective 30GB harddrives from Toshiba, so now I've got a 40GB, and felt like trying out Ubuntu on it, works like a charm, and the wireless card didn't need any setting up this time :-D
The only problem I've had was one which seems to be with Ubuntu and ESD, most probably not the hardware (had add a line to /etc/esound/esd.conf saying
default_options=-nobeeps -as 3
so that esd didn't mess with the other sound drivers).
