Anyone got this beast to work ?
Knoppix freezes shortly after startup.
Mandrake Move 9.1 gets to setting up hardware, and then occasionally spins up the cd and hard drive. Once before that I switched it out to a shell and most of it seems intact. I have to use noapm to boot up.

Got it for $50 (AU) and it's got Win98. Network is fine.
I see reports that people have run Red Hat 5 on it, but I don't know that it can be downloaded anywhere.

Reason I got it - I was after something small-ish to read stuff in bed (eg if I buy an ebook), and a PDA is a bit overkill for that.

Check with Linux-on-Laptops and TuxMobile.

I have a Toshiba 300CDS, so maybe it is not very different. You can find some slighly outdated information about it here:
My site> Computing> Linux> Hardware/t300cds

In short, this laptop does not work with 2.6 kernels, so I previously had Mandrake 9.1 installed on it.
Recently I decided to change, so I tried Damn Small Linux, which is Debian-based. I was very satisfied with DSL! It breathed new life into this old laptop. Unfortunately I had issues with the French localisation.
So I'm now in the process of switching to Debian 3.1 (latest stable). It works well: slower than DSL, but faster than Mdk9.1 it seems. However, I'm not done configuring it yet. So far, I have PCMCIA networking, graphical display working OK, and Matchbox window manager installed.

Yves.

Which version of Damn Small Linux did you use ?
I tried 1.2 and it stops after showing the type of CPU.

I was using the current latest release. However, I saw that I needed to use DSL's own boot floppy. Using "Smart Boot Manager" for booting DSL cd did not work: it freezed after showing the type of CPU!

Yves.

Bummer - this laptop doesn't have a floppy.
The CD drive can be removed, and I guess a toshiba floppy can be installed in it's place, and there's a few other odd connections that could probably connect one.
I don't think I'll worry about it right now; if I ever get linux onto it, I'll add more to this thread (and try getting those linux on laptops sites updated as well - there are references very similar models, but not specifically the 470)

I've just looked at the partitions, and there are two:

/dev/hda1 FAT16 2.1 GB (root)
/dev/hda5 FAT12 16 MB
and 4 MB free.

Is this something "special" for the toshiba, or would it be safe to change this ?

I know that some laptops are very sensitive when it comes to reformating the hard drive because one partition is often used for the suspend-to-disk.

So I can't tell how it is for your Toshiba. All I can say is that for my own Toshiba, I had no idea about the issue, so I carelessly went ahead and formated the drive like this:
/dev/hda1 : swap (64MB)
/dev/hda2 : / (2GB)
This led to no particular consequence.

In fact, this has worked well for me so far: from day one, I've always been able to suspend the laptop by pressing the power button long enough. This makes the middle led blink, and I can resume simply by pressing the power button again.
Actually, this is working even at the earliest stage of the boot process, and I think my laptop does suspend-to-ram in hardware, without relying on the OS at all, which is perfect as far as I'm concerned.

Now the floppy issue: You obviously have at least one OS installed as it is.
- If it is Windows, you may try and use loadlin (I think that's how it is called), that is start linux (CD if possible, else floppy) from inside DOS.
- If it is Linux (another one), I suppose it is possible to install LILO as a boot-loader, and point it to a the floppy image somehow...
- Else you always have the possibility to take the hard disk and put it inside another PC, then install linux and boot-loader on it, and put it back in the laptop. Some people succeded this way, I'm told...

Good luck!

Yves.

Just had a look in the manual - it's a suspend to ram function
It came with Win98, although according to some of it's documentation, it retailed with Win95.
Thanks for those ideas, be interesting to try just from a learning perspective (you're right, it's loadlin).
I have Mandrake 9.0 which uses kernel 2.4, might give that a shot.
Also, the Vector Linux forums has a thread about use of laptops with linux, and one of the entries indicates it works well with this notebook - http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum/vie...9cb2cc96d2562c

I downloaded the Vector Linux 4.0 Live CD, and that booted up ok.
X Windows seems happy, but the config needs tweaking (it seems to ignore 24 bit colour).
Should be possible to build the system from that.
Any recommendations on ebook software ?
I found a java reader for palm formatted ebooks (prc), so I'd need to get java installed for that.

I tried the Vector Linux install CD, and it gets to the point of being ready to select packages.
Then it tries to do something with the CD drive, and the drive spins down, and the install doesn't do anything after that.

I've since blown away the current partitions and created a small swap.
Installing SuSE 9.1 Personal works, KDE very slow, fvwm2 better.
I'm downloading Zenwalk linux (used to be minislack) and will try that too.

Zenwalk 1.2 works nicely, but it doesn't detect sound.
The PCMCIA card is detected and the xircom network card that came with it is running fine (CE3-10/100 CardBus).
I also installed Zenwalk 2.2, and the newer pcmciautils doesn't like the xircom:
this can be resolved by downloading pcmcia-cs-3.2.8-i486-1.tgz.
I ran the installer and it worked. The slackplanet forum that I had linked to died and it looks like the posts went with it.

Edit: The Zenwalk support forum is back again, and I've started a new thread for some clarification at http://support.zenwalk.org/index.php?topic=511.0

I have a Toshiba 4020 CDT with P2 300 and 160 MB RAM. I'm Running Slackware 10.2 + Xfce/Fluxbox. Runs well, actually way better than win98se that it came with. I only use it for surfing the web with wifi.

DSL will work if you enter 'lowram' at the intitial boot option.

I used:

Xvesa xserver
No USB mouse
800x600
16bit
US keyboard

Worked well, but probably going to revert to the comforting warm safety of Win98se...