Very compact, keyboard still big enough to type on. A durable machine.

For this distro (Debian Lenny), most features worked out of the box. Last time I checked, the modem required a third party driver and the IrDA required some work, but I haven't checked since installing Lenny.

The USB is only 1.1 (slow). I also that a cardbus ethernet card ran slow (~1 Mbyte/s transfer, despite being a 100Mbit card), though the docking station ethernet interface was much faster.

Installation can be an issue, as there is no built in media drive. It can boot off a PCMCIA CD drive, or a USB floppy (using F2 at startup to select the boot device). Or you can remove the hard disk and set it up in another machine.

Earlier distros required some extra applications (eg toshset, toshutil) to manage the ACPI, but a significant amount of this functionality is now in the automatically loaded toshiba-acpi module. Many of the specialist function keys (display switch, backlight off, etc) worked without the use of fnfxd.