Hiya all.
My friend purchased a Toshiba laptop, as mentioned in the title of this post.
This thread is directed to anyone who has used/installed Linux on one of these 400Mhz beasts.
It has an Intel Celeron
Mendocino, 128Mb ram, a 6 Gb HD, a DVD-ROM, and a floppy. The internal battery is toast, so no worries about battery-life; it's always plugged in.
The only thing in our HCL here is a
4080-CDTV (I think that was the model) and I located a mere 4 LQ threads that were vaguely about the 4090. Many threads on Google pertained to people running RedHat or Debian on their 4090, neither of which I'm considering.
I'm certain Linux will install no problem 'basically', so I am mainly looking for any experience-based advice regarding quirks, hangups, problems, I should anticipate with drivers, audio, ACPI, whatever..
What I've tested so far:
1 - Ubuntu 6.01 Live CD won't run. It's too big/bloated.
2 - Knoppix 5.11 Live CD runs great, but only in 640x480, and the audio was very faint. Besides this minor stuff, Knoppix is too high-tech and 'secure' for my friend to use easily (don't get me wrong, Knoppix is great, but it's overkill here.)
3 - Slax Killbill LiveCD worked marvelously, after I set up xorg.conf for the vesa driver and a 1024x768 resolution @ 16bpp. The ease of making this LiveCD work perfectly was welcome
Based on these few tests (Slax particularly), I am leaning towards installing EasYs on it. For those unfamiliar, it's a very cool 1-CD Slackware based distro out of Germany. (Slackware fans, check it out
it works GREAT out of the box.)
My main concern here is, as is always the case, the &^#@*$*# WinModem inside this thing. My friend bought this machine for two reasons: she's going overseas for a short time, and wants
A) to play DVD's, and
B) to communicate/email/messenger with the dialup modem.
The LiveCD's I loaded all saw the modem, and identified it basically the same way: a Lucent/Agere 56k PCI winmodem on bus 00:07:0, but there is no built in drivers (to be expected).
I've already been googling and checking out the usual hangouts for drivers, like Linmodems, Winmodems, etc., but as yet haven't decided if I have found the right drivers. If you can point me to a non-distro-specific source-code release of a driver known to work under linux for the modem in this machine, I'd really appreciate a link, as it will be a long time before I forget about the weeks/months I spent trying to get a driver for my other 56k PCI modems (of which ultimately I only got one of three working). It will be a few days or so before I go ahead and start
penguining the machine, and there's no rush; I'd just like some feedback from others who have used the same machine, if possible.
I have read that the VESA driver gives better performance than the Trident driver associated with the Trident onboard video in this thing, and the VESA did indeed work well for me with Slax. Should I go with that, and not bother experimenting, or has something changed re: trident drivers to make it worth using/getting a trident driver?
Any & all advice is welcome. Thank you for reading
~ Sasha
