I am a self employed computer engineer, specialising in Wintel stuff.

I have bitten the bullet to install Linux on my new Toshiba A10 - I feel like a complete computer illiterate again - very frustrating.

I have got Redhat 9 up and running, Sound, Video, Network etc.

My first challenge is that my A10 will only display 800x600.

When I look in the display properties, it "unprobed monitor on Intel 852".

If I click on the "configure" button, I can select from a list of monitors, but the "probe monitor" button is grayed out.

I cant find anything appopriate to use in the list.

I have tried searching the net to find the horizontal and vertical refresh rates for the built in TFT, but I cant find anything.

I can select 1024x768, but when I restart it goes back to 800x600.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction for sorting this out?

SB

Please use the search command before posting laptop video problems on a Toshiba, expecially when your trying to use redhat on it.

This issue has be beaten into us many, many times. And I wouldnt be suprised if 2 or 3 people ask the same question ever day.
Summary.
REDHAT IS BAD FOR TOSHIBA LAPTOPS.
And second, edit your XF86Config file appropriately, find the correct info for your laptop using the search feature or google.

What a wonderful welcome to the friendly Linux community.

I did the search on the board, and I saw people saying "Redhat is bad for toshiba laptops"

As it stands, I have downloaded the 1.5gb worth of Redhat before I found this salient info, everything else is working fine apart from display resolution, so I am going to persist a little longer to try to get this working.

As per my request,
I obviously dont have the correct info my my laptop, I have tried searching this board and google.

On top of that, as I linux newbie, I dont automatically know where to find the XF86Config file to edit it, nor how to use a linux editior, but I am sure that once I track down the correct info for my screen, I will be able to find out how to do this by searching for a howto and arsing around with it.

I am sorry if you are repeatedly asked the same question, I understand how that can be frustrating, but perhaps if it is giving you the shits you should try hanging out somewhere where hundreds of newbies arent going to ask you questions.

My pleasure at seeing someone had replied to my request for help was quickly tempered by your rude and unhelpful reply.

Thanks.

SB

Unhelpful? Fine.

/me does the search himself/

First thing I found was on google, in half a second of reading, but Typing the words "Satellite A10" and "Linux"

What did I find? That there are video drivers for your laptop on intel's website. That didnt take a whole lot of time or effort to do!

Second thing I find, searching on linux questions site... words "Editing" and "XF86Config". no less that 13 FULL PAGES of instructions on how to edit the file, contained in a few hundred posts. Complete howtos, mini tips, even tells you what program to use.

The only reason it wasnt helpful is you didnt want to use the help. Most people here have no issues with checking old posts when asked to.

***edit***
I come back realizing you probably wont check any of the old toshiba posts for your screen rate help either, so. Just go back into the XF86Config program that set up your monitor to begin with, and this time pick a Dell Laptop Display as your monitor, just match the resolution, and that should set the refresh rates just perfect.

Oh! So much tension!

Just do this (I had the same problem):

>cd /etc/X11
>emacs XF86Config

Now find the bit about the HorizSync, and change it to 30 - 61, and the VertRefresh to 50 -75, then manually enter the 1024x768 and 24 bit color resolution in the area below. Save, reboot, and enjoy!

there is a bios hack for the intel 855, bios doesnt know more than 800k video ram, maybe the same prob?

Caeda,

safetyboy, is dead right, there's absolutely no reason to chastise someone for not finding their own solution to a problem when they don't yet know what question to really ask. That is what we're here for. I've answered a couple hundred simple and not-so-simple XFree86 questions and I've never spun someone off to look through google so quickly.

Next, the X problem. Caeda is half right in the "Redhat is bad for Toshiba laptops" statement. Largely, Redhat is bad for laptops. RH 9 is ancient now, they pulled the release of 10 long ago and then waffled around for months until finally forking the desktop distro into Fedora Core. RedHat never gave as much attention as was necessary to laptop specific things, like odd LCDs, pcmcia, and most missing, ACPI support.

Now, since this is a learning experiment, you may want to reconsider distros as RedHat is a bit of a evolutionary cul-de-sac at this point, SuSe is much more desktop friendly, and Mandrake is built basically only for the desktop. Both were a little smarter about ACPI support as well.

The graphics problem will still happen, everything in the distro world recently has standardized on XFree 4.3.0, the most recent, stable, XFree86 release; which is the Linux/Unix/Bsd's GUI component. X may or may not, as shadowhunter pointed out, fully support your graphics chip yet. This is no fault of X, its usually hardware manufacturers being recalcitrant in volunteering specs to developers.

First, lets figure out what chip you've got, open up a terminal: Konsole, Gnome-Terminal, whichever, and try the command:

/sbin/lspci

The Toshiba A10 series is large, and comes with more then one graphics option, under "VGA Controller" it'll tell you exactly what you've got. Paste that in here...

Also, go ahead and paste the entirety of the file /etc/X11/XF86Config, it might go over the max line count but that's fine, just do 2 entries.

Cheers,

Finegan

Safetyboy,

I have a Tosh A10 and have had RH9, Mandrake 9.1 and SuSE 9 Pro running on it with no problems.

I would have to suggest you get hold of SuSE 9 Professional - I'd also suggest you buy a copy. The boxed set comes with 2 excellent manuals for you to peruse and refer to. The installation is a dream and is over and done with in around 45 minutes. The whole set up is wonderful (BTW - I don't work for SuSE )

I know it is disheartening to d/l RH and then be told not to bother, but Finegan is right - RedHat are discontinuing their desktop distributions.

SuSE and Mandrake are great for noobs, but SuSE amazingly found and configured all the hardware. The only difficulty is that you need to manually configure ACPI, but when you are ready to do it come back and (after a search for how to configure it ) ask away and someone will be happy to help.

XavierP,

Does that include the software modem, winmodem?

Have to admit that as I have cable via ethernet at home and it all works on the LAN at work, I haven't actually used the modem at all - whether on Linux or on Windows. I believe that SuSE found and configured it but can't prove it as I never tested it.

Sorry, but I searched the web and couldn't find anything specific about the modem. I believe it to be a Lucent modem which does have drivers for Linux.

safetyboy,

I have WinXP, RH9 and Fedora Core 1 on my Toshiba M10-S405. I installed RH9 after WinXP and before
FC1. During the install I must have misidentified the monitor. I could not select anything above 800x600. The solution was available without even going to the terminal.

Under System Settings/Display/Advanced/Monitor/Configure I selected Generic Laptop Display Panel 1024x768, which happens to be my laptops native display resolution. Then under System Settings/Display/Display I selected the appropriate resolution.

The first couple of times that I attempted to set the resolution I missed that I had not correctly identified the monitor and was of course unsuccessful.

Both distros work acceptably well for me. I still could use Centrino support but Intel still won't support my desktop's ICH5R either. I did sign the petition and tell Intel that my most recent purchases had been Intel but without support for their hardware that I would be returning to AMD products exclusively.


XavierP,
Thanks.

No probs, flysideways. Sorry I couldn't give more help on the modem. You could try contacting Toshiba's tech support - they could tell you the chipset/model. As I say, I think it is a Lucent Winmodem and so it will have drivers. Chances are the Toshiba techies are Linux fans and can give you the driver location. Possibly.

A lot of the ICH5 chipset components are preliminarily supported in the -ac tree to the 2.4.x series. I wouldn't expect it in stock 2.4.x anytime soon as Marcelo is being very conservative with x86 hardware support, I haven't checked 2.6.x in a while, but I would be surprised if it wasn't in one of the -testX kernels.

Cheers,

Finegan