Hi all - just chucked Vista in the recycle bin and installed WinXP then Ububtu 8.04 and while reading LQ and other webspots and Toshie websites I found the model numbers vary from place to place - mine is A200-"PSAF6A" (Oz), I see others as A200-"AH1" etc, and USA website uses just numbers like A200-"12041". Makes it hard to search globe for drivers. Does anyone know the equivalencies or doesn't it matter much ie just look for drivers from the various manufacturers of all the different bits in the machine?

Ubuntu comes with a lot of drivers pre-installed called "modules". You can view which drivers are present by typing the "lsmod" command. Typically you don't need to install additional drivers although I have seen a lot of problems with Toshiba laptops supporting linux. Is there something specific you are trying to get to work and its not working?

Welcome to LQ!
First,I have Toshiba Satellite A100 laptop,it's almost 2 years old and lots of Linux distros have been running on it.Sometimes you need to install extra drivers but that would depend on the distro that you want to use.About the numbers;don't worry about it,you just have to know what drivers you need for a certain part of your laptop,is it for a grafic card,wireless card,doesn't matter.

Thanks for that - I'm trying to get my wifi working. Some gurus on the web seem to have good advice, but when they give examples of commands they miss things in the syntax so error messages result. As I'm a linux/unix noob (read dill) I don't need this hassle. I was pointed at a file to download - did that - and was instructed to copy to the /lib/firmware directory but using the ubuntu file manager app it said I couldn't do that because I didn't have the necessary permissions. Now let me tell you that this sort of crap is EXACTLY why I ditched Vista - I own the machine ipso facto I own what's on it and if I screw it up it's my fault. So thanks for your patient listening to my rant. I'll keep trying to find out how to copy the Intel file "iwlwifi-3945-2.ucode" to /lib/firmware - or I'll just give up (again) and stay with XP for another few years.

99nickh,
You shoud first understand why there are not some drivers included by default in certain distros or why there is no such a good support for certain hardware.I suggest that you read this.
Before you go with installing drivers on your own,you should first learn some basic things about Linux,you can start here and here.
You should know that Ubuntu has root account disabled by default,that's why you have to use sudo sometimes to achive something.This is when you need to understand what is Bash.There are so many commands which you can use in it,here's one of the lists.

lspci command will give you good info about your hardware.
man lspci is a manual page for that command.There are lots of manual pages for lots of different commands.man man will get you started.
This is all if you want to know your system.Maybe you have choosen a wrong distro to start with.There is a Distrowatch to help you choose.Linux Mint is configured with lots of drivers and other things by default and it's Ubuntu based.I suggest that you give it a try and then start to learn more about Linux.

If you need the iwl3495 driver I suggest you read the documentation at http://www.intellinuxwireless.org and download the driver there. It's easy if you read the documentation and follow the instructions.

With respect to permissions - when you unpack a file in tar.gz format, you need to uncompress it using the command:
I would advise you do not use the GUI to extract the file. Then you can copy the contents to the desired directory with root permissions or sudo.