Linux on the Toshiba Satellite 4070CDT Laptop

Last update: Nov 12th 2001

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

Summary: The first installation was not straightforward due to a problem with the gpm utility and the finding of the proper configuration for X11. Further ones were smoother.

Introduction: This file contains information relevant to installing and using Linux on a Toshiba Satellite 4070CDT laptop purchased in july 1999.

The laptop is a strange things which is hardly mentioned in Toshiba's documentation. According to the manual it is the same as the Satellite 4100, except for the central processor which is a Celeron @ 366MHz instead of a Pentium II @ 400MHz.

The laptop comes with 64 Mb of RAM (upgradable up to 192 MB) and 4.3 Gb of hard disk. The screen is a 13.3 inches TFT with 1024x768 by 16 bpp resolution.

After a disk crash the internal disk was upgraded to 12 Gb in nov. 2001. This required a reinstallation of Linux. See details along this paper. Installation: I installed a plain RedHat 6.0 distribution from CD-ROM with no problem.

Later I also installed RedHat 7.0 with similar results (only see the note to X11 installation).

Finally RedHat 7.2 was installed on the laptopo with a new 12 Gb disk.

I left about 1 Gb for Windows 98 (I'm not the owner of the laptop, my own PC's are all completely Microsoft-free) and devoted the rest to Linux.

On the disk-upgraded system the partitioning was 5 Gb to Windows and 9 Gb to Linux.

The following paragraph is related to the first RH 6.0 installation only.

After installation I noticed that after the booting of Linux the keyboard was not working anymore (the only way to get out from this state was by switching off the laptop completely by extracting the battery). After some fiddling I could trace the problem to the gpm utility which is started by default at boot time. As the man states:

GPM(8)                                                     GPM(8)

NAME
       gpm - a cut and paste utility and mouse server for virtual
       consoles

I actually didn't need that and simply removed the file /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S85gpm which starts the gpm at boot time. To do that I booted from a rescue floppy, mounted the root partition under /mnt and deleted the file (but see the following note)

NOTE: if you have linuxconf up and running, it will restore the S85gpm file at each reboot, so you can get your hair white trying to remove it with no success. In this case you must find a way to boot as above and remove the gpm by running linuxconf and following the proper steps (see linuxconf documentation).

X-Windows: This was the actual problem, because first of all the XFree86 distributed with RedHat 6.0 (XFree86 Version 3.3.3.1) didn't recognize the graphic card which happens to be a Trident Cyber 9525 DVD.

I solved the problem by downloading the very last version of XFree86 (Version 3.3.4) from the XF86 site (http://www.xfree86.org).

After that the problem was to find out a "modeline" definition suitable for the screen. After many failed attempts with XF86Setup utility I decided to systematically test all the XF86Config files available on the XF86Config Archive selecting config. files provided for various 1024x768 LCD screens, and the third attempt was the right one. Here is the XF86Config file which works well.

When probed with X -probeonly it provides some diagnostic output.

RH 7.0 Note: RedHat 7.0 installation goes smooth for the card recognition (the XFree86 version is 3.3.6), but the file XF86Config generated automatically is still not good (it depends, I guess, by the fact that it is difficult to specify the monitor characteristics). The XF86Config file provided above is quit good, anyway, except for the single line specifying the font server. The line:
    FontPath   "unix/:-1" 
which is good for RedHat 6.x, must be:
    FontPath   "unix/:7100" 
for RH 7.0 (It is the name of the pipe created by xfs in the directory /tmp/.font-unix).
RH 7.2 Note: RedHat 7.2 installation comes with XFree86 4.x. It recognize the grphic hardware, but starts with 640x480 screen.
So I merged the configuration lines from the previous conf file into the generated config file (which is now named XF86Config-4). The good configuration file which uses the full screen resolution can be found here.

PCMCIA: Standard PCMCIA support as provided in the RedHat distribution works smoothly: you plug-in the card and listen to the two beeps.

Network: The network was started with no problems. I tried both a Genius ME3001II SE PCMCIA card and a Trendware TE-210CT card.

Modem: (RH 7.2 Note : The modem stuff has not yet been tested under RH 7.2) The modem is a Lucent Mars chipset DSP modem for which Lucent provides a Linux driver module.

I downloaded the support file: http://www.linmodems.org/linux568.zip and executed the installation script provided (Note: The installation script fiddles with the rc.local file, I actually gave the same commands by hand). After that the module is installed at boot time (it gives a warning related to unresolved symbols, but I ignored it) and I could use "minicom" to connect to a remote system. I had just to modify the initial setting because the modem didn't recognize the dialtone (but this is usual in Italy: all my modems have dialtone check disabled with the command: ATX0).

Note: The modem drivers use the sound support to let you listen to the dialtones and initial modem connection. If the sound system is not installed the modem works all the same, but it is difficult to know what it is doing.

Sound: (RH 7.2 Note: The installation detects and install the sound support automatically) The sound system is an ESS Mastro 2E. The latest Red Hat (6.1) sndconfig says "detected Maestro 2E. To use your ESS Maestro PCI Card, you need a driver that does not yet ship with RedHat Linux. Beta versions of this driver are available at: http://people.redhat.com/zab/maestro

Following various liks I arrived at the "ALSA" project home page (http://www.alsa-project.org/) where I found the driver. I got the following files:

alsa-driver-0.5.6.tar.bz2  alsa-mini-HOWTO.html 
alsa-lib-0.5.6.tar.bz2     alsa-utils-0.5.6.tar.bz2

and followed the directions to install the driver modules and the utilities. I do not repeat them here, but they are essentially the usual sequence config, make, make install. I selected the module for the ESS 1968 which was apparently the most close to the actual card installed on the laptop

Then I added the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to start up the sound at boot:

modprobe soundcore
modprobe snd-card-es1968
modprobe snd-pcm-oss
modprobe snd-mixer-oss
/usr/bin/amixer set Master 50% unmute
/usr/bin/amixer set PCM 50% unmute

Remember to turn the sound volume manual regulation on!

Advanced Power Management (APM): APM support under RedHat Linux 6.0 is active by default and works well.

Notes:

When installing with the RedHat provided procedure the very last step (installing lilo on the boot sector) may fail. After that Linux will noot boot from the hard disk and you have to boot from floppy and reinstall lilo by hand.
This happens when you plan to have a bootstrappable dos/windows partition but you have not yet installed dos/windows on that partition, in such a case lilo find an error and installation fails.
You simply must avoid to specify among the bootstrappable partitions those who are not ready yet. You must rerun lilo from the working linux system after dos/windows has been installed.

Acknowledgements: I have got useful hints from the Linux Laptop web page and the RedHat errata page. Michal Jaegermann <michalPhys.UAlberta.CA> replied to my help request published on the newsgroup linux.dev.laptop and provided some hints related to the gpm problem. Matze Braun <matzebraunis.de> replied to my request for help posted on the alsa-useralsa-project.org mailing list and gave useful hints on the setting of the sound modules and provided the key solution to my biggest problem: the volume knob was set to zero!

I downloaded pieces of needed stuff from:

ALSA project home: http://www.alsa-project.org/
Linmodems.org: http://www.linmodems.org/

Luca Fini (lfini

arcetri.astro.it) --- Home page