Finally got a laptop!
 

Yes! I finally got a laptop. Its a toshiba satellite 1950-801 and i have to say its really nice so far. In fact i got it an hour ago, so i didnt have much chance to play with it. I'm a little bit concerned about a couple of things though..

1) There is only one intake and and one out-take fan. Hope thats enough...

2) It came with a damn italian keyboard which is missing {} and ~ . In addition to put / it's shift+7 which as you can immagine, while using Linux and having to press shift+7 for / is a big pain... Hope i can somehow change it for a us keyboard. It's wireless, i can take it out of the laptop, so it should be no problem sticking a US keyboard instead. The only concern is that Toshiba might not sell only keyboards for laptops... Gotta e-mail them and ask...

3) Not surprisingly, it came with winXP pre-installed and strange partition scheme. theres /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 when i looked at it with fdisk. I guess that would be logical partition with 2 extended partitions inside it? (I'm not very literate when it comes to partitions...). Now, i didnt get a winXP disk, so i have to find a way to resize these partitions and make new ones without whiping winXP out. Is this possible, say with GnuParted? Or Will i have to whipe out everything and install win2000 after all?

4) Hope all those buttons for controlling the DVD and contrast/brightness, etc will work...

5) Software modem... well what else could i expect... A WLAN card.. hope i'll get it to work...

I also booted knoppix live cd on it, and sound, graphics card, and ethernet worked no problem.
As soon as Patrick sends me my copy of Slack i ordered last week, It's Linux time!

Now if someone can please answer the partitioning question that would be great! I'm happy with the laptop overall...
Comments?
-NSKL

my guess would be that windows will be on /dev/hda1. Then I would suggest you look into what's on /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda5

if on those two no windows files exist, then it's safe to use them for linux I guess ... I believe there is a program to resize ntfs partitions, though the name escapes me and I haven't tried it out myself...

On my laptop, these worked out of the box:
brightness/contrast
numlock
capslock

and I have had to add these:
volume up and down
some button near my screen which now control e-mail and browser...

so yeah, I think you'll get it all going well :)

edit: Sorry, I assumed a newb(like me) because of all the questions...I was just gonna say that you should label your threads with more info on the questions....but that's up to the poster.