Linux on the Toshiba Portege 7010CT Laptop

Revised: 16 march 2000

Disclaimer: This is freely available information which comes with absolutely no guarantees. Use at your own risk.

Summary: This file contains information relevant to installing and using Linux on a Toshiba Portege 7010CT laptop purchased in April 1999.

Introduction: Installation was easy but not straightforward because the PCMCIA CD-ROM drive is somewhat strange. I have installed various versions of RedHat Linux in the time and I've used a few different installation methods.

The Portege is a great piece of stuff: incredibly slim and light it sports a 300 MHz Pentium II and allows up to 154 Mb of main memory (I filled it up) and 4.1 Gb of hard disk. The screen is a 12.1 inches TFT with 800x600 resolution.

What you pay for the slimness is the fact that both the floppy and the CD drives are external (and, moreover, the CD needs its own power supply) and when you need both you finish up with a sort of network of interconnected pieces on top of your desk. The actual owner of the laptop, anyway, is a mechanical engineer and not used to the subtleties of hi-tech electronics: he soldered a second DC connector in parallel to the output of the power supply so that, at least he can use a single power supply for both the laptop and the CD-ROM (well, he first verified that power consumption was compatible with the power supply).

Installation: I installed a plain RedHat 5.2 distribution. Later the system was upgraded to RedHat 6.1.

The Protege came with preinstalled Win 98 and a "rescue" CD which allows to reinstall it if necessary, so I didn't do any backup.

The RedHat installation manual let you choose among three installation methods and I first tried the usual one: installing from the local CD-ROM after booting a minimal system from floppy disk. For doing that with a PCMCIA CD-ROM controller you usually need to use a supplement floppy disk in the initial booting phase.

This didn't work with our Portege because the specific CD-ROM Drive, an Optegra Mobile CD-ROM with PCMCIA card, is not supported by the minimal system loaded from floppy disks. So I tried the second way: installing from the FAT32 partition. In practice you must have Win 9x working on a partition and some other disk space free for Linux, and you must copy the entire installation CD-ROM content on some directory of the Win partition.

To do that you must first use some utility to repartition the disk (the laptop comes with a single big partition all dedicated to Win 9x) to leave space for Linux. I created a 2.0 Gb partition for Win 9x and left the rest unused (later the RedHat installation procedure guides you to define partitions as needed). Then I reinstalled Win 9x from the rescue CD-ROM (using smarter partition programs such as Partition Magic would have been easier, but I had not one at hand) and copied the Linux distribution onto the hard disk.

As I noticed later on, when nothing worked, here comes a problem because of differences of file naming conventions between the installation procedure and the root directory of the distribution on the Win 9x disk. This can be solved by using the new boot disks provided by Redhat as bug fix. See: http://www.redhat.com/corp/support/errata/rh52-errata-general.html Package: New Boot Images.

After the successful installation of Linux I used fdisk and mke2fs to change the FAT32 partition into Linux native and added it as another filesystem. I then officially declared the Portege a Microsoft free laptop.

X-Windows: XFree86 installed smoothly with no human intervention: the chipset is probed and recognized automagically and X11 comes up with no effort. 800x600 x 16 bits per pixel resolution works well and I suggest to define a 1024x768 virtual screen. The XF86Config file was generated automatically with no effort on our side. Here is the diagnostic output generated when starting the X server.

PCMCIA: Standard PCMCIA support as provided in the RedHat distribution works almost smooth (a few problems with the different RH Linux versions are discussed below) for most cards you plug-in the card and listen to the two beeps.

Problems with the CD-ROM PCMCIA card (Note: this changes with newer versions of RH Linux). The card (see above) didn't work at first attempt: a low pitch beep when probing the card signalled that it was not recognized. I dug into the PCMCIA directory and looked into /etc/pcmcia/config. All the ATA/IDE disks are supported by the same driver, so I thought that the problem was in detecting the card type. By using the cardctl ident command I found the string returned by the card as reply to probing and added the following lines to the file /etc/pcmcia/config:

card "My own CD-ROM"
   version "FREECOM", "PCCARD-IDE", "REV820"
   bind "ide_cs"

After that the CD-ROM was up and running.

Network: I also tried to connect the laptop to an Ethernet LAN via a TRENDnet PCMCIA Ethernet Card manufactured by TRENDware; it is an NE2000 compatible 10baseT interface. This was simply a flash: plug in the card (the two high pitch beep showed that it was recognized and the driver installed properly), configure the network address and the other network stuff, and go.

Advanced Power Management (APM): (Note: this changes with newer versions of RH Linux). To enable APM in RedHat Linux you must recompile the kernel adding APM support. This is pretty easily done following the Kernel-HOWTO. Unfortunately after that you're not finished: there is some protection in the PCMCIA modules which prevents them to load if the kernel version doesn't match. So after rebuilding the kernel the APM works just fine, but PCMCIA support disappears. The solution is to recompile and reinstall PCMCIA loadable modules as directed in the PCMCIA-HOWTO.

Upgrading to rh 6.1 After a while the OS version was upgraded to RH 6.1. I believe that some of the following information can be useful for a first time installation too. This time I did a network upgrade, because the Ethernet card was available and working. In order to make a network installation via a PCMCIA Ethernet card you must use the specific boot diskette (see RedHat Installation manual). The card was recognized and I was able to access the RedHat installation CD-ROM mounted on a workstation and exported via NFS. The upgrade was smooth. The kernel now has APM support compiled into, so the section about APM support above is not to be followed anu longer. APM is up and running by default.

I had only some troubles with the PCMCIA support.

First the CD-ROM. The PCMCIA card was recognized by the card manager and the correct driver was started, but the CD-ROM refused to work due to an interrupt problem. The message was: lost interrupt irq 9 and actually the startup message from the CD-ROM said that it was getting irq 9. I thought of an interrupt conflict and wrote the line:
exclude irq 9
into the file: /etc/pcmcia/config.opt in order to force the use of another interrupt. After rebooting the CD-ROM actually took irq 10 and this solved the problem.
Then the PCMCIA starting procedure. At the beginning pcmcia support was not enabled at boot time; that was easily solved by telling "linuxconf" to add it to the list of services to start at boot. But then neither the CD-ROM or the Ethernet PCMCIA cards were working after boot. The command cardctl ident showed no PCMCIA card inserted (there were two) despite a bunch of beeps during bootstrap. By issuing the two commands:
cardctl eject
cardctl insert
from a root prompt the PCMCIA support was running again. I thought it was a timing problem: the PCMCIA commands were given too fast or too early in the boot procedure. So here is the line I added at the end of file: /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
(sleep 5; cardctl eject; sleep 5; cardctl insert) &
That is, at the end of boot procedure and after 5 seconds delay for good measure, an "eject" command is issued followed by an "insert" command (still with a delay in between: it doesn't work without it).
After that I had the system up and working with all the gadgets; I only have to wait a little after boot before trying to use either the network or the CD-ROM: just the time to log in without rushing.

Acknowledgements: I have got useful hints from the Linux Laptop web page and the RedHat errata page. Ciro Del Vecchio provided the Portege and begged for help in installing Linux and Armando Riccardi helped with kernel recompilation and loadable modules set up.

Luca Fini (lfini

arcetri.astro.it) --- Home page