Linux on the Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 (series)

Last update: Jun 12 2000

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

Summary: Installation was not straightforward due to the graphic support: it requires the frame-buffer device (See X11)

Introduction: This file contains information relevant to installing and using Linux on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 laptop purchased in april 2000.

The laptop sports a Pentium III processor @ 500 MHz and laptop comes with 64 Mb of RAM (upgradable to 320 MB) and 6.0 Gb of hard disk. The screen is a 13.0 inches DSTN with 800x600 by 16 bpp resolution.

Above are listed the specification of the particular laptop I've at hand, the same family (4200) includes also higher capabilities laptops.

Installation: I installed a plain RedHat 6.2 distribution from CD-ROM with no problem.

I left about 1.5 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.

X-Windows: This was the actual problem, because the PC only works with the framebuffer device. This implies some fiddling with the lilo.conf file and starting the proper Xserver.

During installation the graphic card is not recognized and you can answer to questions related to graphic card installation in any way; just be sure that the hardware is not probed at the end of the X11 installation steps: you must redo this part by hand later.

Fortunately the Redhat kernel comes with frame-buffer support already compiled in and you do not need to rebuild the kernel.

All you need to do is adding to the file /etc/lilo.conf the two lines "vga" and "append" shown below:


        boot = /dev/hda
        timeout = 50
        linear
        prompt
          default = linux
>>>       vga = 0x314
          read-only
        map=/boot/map
        install=/boot/boot.b
        image = /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14-5.0
          label = linux
          root = /dev/hda2
>>>       append = "video=atyfb:800x600,font=SUN12x22"

This enables the frame buffer. If you want to know more about the framebuffer you can refer to the Framebuffer-HOWTO: you can find it int the documentation area of any RedHat installation (and I suppose on other distributions, too) or at the LDP site.

Note that the actual resolution of the screen must be specified on the "append" line. If a wrong one is given (I started with 1024x768) everything works all the same, but you get many lines out of the bottom of your screen.

You must also modify the XF86Config file in order to have X11 working. A file //etc/X11/XF86Config should have been created during installation, if not the easiest way to do it is to use the xf86config script to create a fake configuration file. You must provide consistent answers to questions regarding the keyboard, the mouse and the monitor capabilities, and dummy answers to questions related to the video board and the screen.

Then you must edit the file (/etc/X11/XF86Config) and find the "Screen" section related to your screen. Here you must put something like:

Section "Screen"
    Driver      "fbdev"
    Device      "Trident Blade3D"
    Monitor     "AOC Spectrum 5Vlr"
    Defaultcolordepth 16
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       16
        Modes       "default"
    EndSubsection
EndSection

Where the Device specification must be equal to the line Identifier of the Device section and the Monitor specification must be equal to the line Identifier of the "Monitor" section. All the other subsections can be deleted.

Finally you must get the proper X server starting when typing the X command. To do that you must remove the link /usr/bin/X11/X and do a new link:

ln -s /usr/bin/X11/XF86_FBDev /usr/bin/X11/X

NOTE: if the framebuffer graphic driver XF86_FBDev is not available in /usr/bin/X11/ you can download it from the current binary distribution of XFree86, e.g.: at http://www.xfree86.org.

PCMCIA: Standard PCMCIA support as provided in the RedHat distribution works smoothly: you plug-in the card and the network starts, if properly configured. You don't hear the beeps if you don't install the proper audio support.

Network: The network was started with no problems. I used a Genius ME3001II SE PCMCIA card.

Modem: The modem is some winmodem. I tried with success to use the modem a Linux driver module provoided by Lucent.

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 different release of the kernel, but you may ignore 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: The sound system is apparently a Yamaha YMF-744B. And is not supported by the Redhat installation. So I went to the "ALSA" project home page (http://www.alsa-project.org/) where I found the driver in version 0.5.8a. I got the following files:

alsa-driver-0.5.8a.tar.bz2  alsa-mini-HOWTO.html 
alsa-lib-0.5.8.tar.bz2     alsa-utils-0.5.8.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 YMF-744 card. Then I added the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to start up the sound at boot:

modprobe soundcore
modprobe snd-card-ymfpci
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 6.2 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.

I downloaded pieces of needed stuff from:

ALSA project home: http://www.alsa-project.org/
Linmodems.org: http://www.linmodems.org/
XFree86 project home: http://www.xfree86.org.

Luca Fini (lfini

arcetri.astro.it) --- Home page