Toshiba 2805-S402 Linux Configuration

NOTE: This page is old... like from October 2001. Here for anyone who might find it useful.

Since Toshiba doesn't offer laptops with Linux preloaded I embarked on a quest to configure this unit to use Redhat. Here's what I've got:

Toshiba Satellite 2805-S402 w/ GeForce2 go video
RedHat Linux 7.1
Linksys Wireless Lan card (in addition to the built-in ethernet port)

Before we begin

Since I wasn't interested in dual boot with M$ I won't cover that here. One of the first things I did upon unpacking this laptop was delete the windows partition without booting it up into windows. There is a good overview of setting up dual boot with Partition Magic on a similar laptop (2805-S302) here.

RedHat 7.1 installs well with a couple of exceptions. The X setup doesn't recognize the card properly and the soundcard has a buzz on the pcm channel. However music CD's play fine.

This document represents a couple weeks of hunting websites, search-engines and newsgroups for clues on how to get the video working. Hopefully you won't have to do all that leg work. If you find anything wrong with, or want to contribute to this document drop me a note at james@vantslot.net.
Here's a step-by-step on what I did to resolve these issues:

Video

I have been able to get the GeForce2 go card to work on this machine, and so far it's working well. Before I got the nvidia drivers properly configured I used the vesa drivers in order to get X up and running so I could at least get KDE running and get some work done.

Getting X up and running with "vesa"

Save yourself a headache and edit /etc/inittab and change the line

id:5:initdefault:

to read
id:3:initdefault:

This will prevent the computer from booting into Runlevel 5 (graphical login) during our debugging. You can restore this later if you wish.

As Root edit the /etc/lilo.conf and add the line vga=792
like so:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
message=/boot/message
linear
default=linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.2-2
  label=linux
  read-only
  root=/dev/hda7
  append="hdc=ide-scsi"
  vga=792

Update lilo by running /sbin/lilo
This will give you a full screen shell and a nice little penguin logo at bootup.

Edit your XF86Config file (for RH7.1 this is /etc/X11/XF86Config-4) and add the following lines:
- Under Section "Monitor" add Option "IgnoreEDID" "on"
  This disables X from getting the monitor capabilites from the monitor itself. Apparently some monitors "lie" about what they are capable of.
- Under Section "Device" change the Driver "vga" (or whatever driver ) to Driver "vesa"

Cranking up the GeForce2 go

The whole reason you bought this laptop over all others was the NVidia GeForce video card right? Ok, here's what I did to get this up and running:

Grab the latest Nvida Linux drivers from the NVidia website. Since I was using the default kernel that installed with RedHat 7.1 I just grabbed the rpm files for the kernel and GLX modules. If you have compiled your own kernel you will probably need to get the tarballs.

Install the Nvidia drivers. Since this is beyond the scope of this document, I will not go into the details of this here. You can find more about how to do this from NVidia or over at Evil3d.net along with a nice GeForce overclocking app.

Change the driver from vesa to nvidia in your XF86Config file

The NVidia support for GeForce2 go on Linux is still in beta so we have to pass the nvidia kernel module a special parameter. Edit the /etc/modules.conf file and add the following line:

options NVdriver NVreg_Mobile=2

Note: NVreg_Mobile=1 is for Dell and NVreg_Mobile=2 is for Toshiba
This was a very obscure reference that I found, but it made all the difference in getting nvidia to work on this laptop

That should do it! You will know you are successful by the full screen NVidia logo that comes up when you start X

Here's a link to my XF86Config-4 file.

Sound

I haven't had time to figure out how to kill the buzzing sound on the pcm channel. It is apparently due to an irq conflict with the cardbus. For now I turn the level all the way down on pcm using kmix and save the settings as default. CD music plays well though.

I'll update this section as I find a solution.

Update [06/22/2001]: After several days of trying to get this card properly configured, I gave in and bought and downloaded the commercial oss drivers from 4front Technologies. The install is relatively painless and all the instructions are included. Not the best situation, but I was not successful using the alsa drivers. Hopefully as Linux grows in marketshare, hardware vendors will make sure their products are supported. But until then, I am at least grateful for the relief found with the commercial oss drivers. My mp3's sound great!

Update [06/25/2001]: Per Miles Egan: Apparently the buzzing sound is fixed in the Linux 2.4.5 kernel. I installed and compiled the latest kernel and sure enough, no more buzzing sound! Nice!

Update [11/06/2001]: After upgrading to RedHat7.2 my sound went on the fritz so I re-tackled the sound problem. Here's how to get the sound working properly:

Make sure you have the kernel source installed and a linked to /usr/src/linux
Grab the latest ALSA drivers from http://www.alsa-project.org I used the 0.9.0beta9 files and they worked fine
Make sure you grab the ALSA driver, ALSA library and the ALSA utilities.

Copy the files to a temporary directory. I use /usr/local/src to keep things clean

Uncompress the files:

# bunzip2 *.bz2 # tar xvf alsa-driver-0.9.0-beta9.tar (or whatever version you grabbed) # tar xvf alsa-lib-0.9.0-beta9.tar # tar xvf alsa-utils-0.9.0-beta9.tar

Enter each of the new directories in the order listed above and run the usual ...

# ./configure # make # make install

If all went well and there were no errors, go ahead and build the devices:

# cd /usr/local/src/alsa-driver-0.9.0-beta9 # ./snddevices

Add the following to /etc/modules.conf:

alias char-major-14 soundcore alias char-major-116 snd alias snd-card-0 snd-card-ymfpci alias snd-slot-0 snd-card-0

Add the following to your startup script I put mine in /etc/rc.d/rc.local near the bottom:

echo "Initializing sound system..." /usr/bin/amixer set Master 50 unmute 2>/dev/null >/dev/null /usr/bin/amixer set PCM 50 unmute 2>/dev/null >/dev/null /usr/bin/amixer set CD 50 unmute 2>/dev/null >/dev/null modprobe snd-card-ymfpci 2>/dev/null >/dev/null modprobe snd-pcm-oss 2>/dev/null >/dev/null modprobe snd-mixer-oss 2>/dev/null >/dev/null

Reboot

DVD

DVD support on Linux is not very far along, I'm afraid to say. I have gotten the DVD player to work with the vesa drivers (with lackluster frame rates) using LiViD the "Linux Video and DVD" project. You can find out more at linuxvideo.org. I haven't been successful at getting the DVD player to work properly using the nvidia drivers. I'll post more when I figure it out.

Update [01/13/2002]: A. Rauchfuss sent me an e-mail detailing how to set up DVD viewing on this laptop:

Download the latest xine-lib and xine-ui projects from xine.sourceforge.net into a temporary directory.
The current files are:
xine-lib-0.9.7.tar.gz
xine-ui-0.9.7.tar.gz

Next grab a css decoder for playback of commercial DVDs, www.geocities.com/xinedvdplugin provides xine_dmd_plugin_1.0.2.tgz (or newer). Drop this file into the same temporary directory.

Un-tar the xine-lib file:

$ tar xzvf xine-lib-0.9.7.tar.gz

Change to the newly created directory:

$ cd xine-lib-0.9.7

Run the following commands in sequence:

$ ./configure make su root make install

Now that the libs are created we need to update ld...
Add the following line to /etc/ld.so.conf:

/usr/local/lib

Update ld with:

# /sbin/ldconfig

Now lets do follow the same steps with the other files we downloaded. You can skip the ldconfig step as we aren't compiling anymore system libraries.

Next just run xine from the command line (or add a link) and select the DVD tab and click the vcr play button. Enjoy!

Networking

No real issues here. RedHat 7.1 install recognized and configured both the built-in ethernet port and my add-on Linksys Wireless LAN Card (very cool).

Note: I'm using the Linksys Wireless LAN Card around the house so I don't have to be tethered to a network cable. I've found one flaw in the 802.11 standard: bridging. Apparently no 802.11 devices support bridging. Where this comes in to play is if you are running VMware to access a M$ virtual machine. You will not be able to access the network from the virtual machine using the 802.11 interface. You can still access it using the standard ethernet port on (eth0) on this laptop, so it's really a matter of convenience. Obviously this is not an issue with the 2805-S402. I only include it here for those who might be searching all over for a solution to the VMware bridging issue with this network card.

Modem

I haven't been able to configure this modem as of yet. If anyone wants to take this one on feel free. I will post the results. If you have any leads or solutions to the winmodem on this Toshiba drop me a line at james@vantslot.net.

SmartMedia Card

I haven't messed with this one yet so I couldn't tell you if it works or not. Anybody?

Firewire Port

I don't have any Firewire devices for my laptop so I haven't messed with this yet. According to Mark A. Fowler there is good info about setting up Firewire over at Sourceforge. Thanks for the link Mark!

Performance Tips

Disk I/O: I gained significant disk performance with /sbin/hdparm. I modified the file /etc/sysconfig/harddisks (RedHat) or you can add an hdparm script to your boot up. A nice tutorial on hdparm can be found over at linux.oreillynet.com.

X11: Some interesting X11 boosting ideas can be found over at Linux.com.

Linux Toshiba Utils can be found at Linux.org. A must for this laptop. The Toshiba Utils include a small program for turning on and off the fan on Toshiba laptops. Very important because this laptop runs hot!

TrueType Anti-Aliased fonts: You can use TrueType fonts in KDE!
1. Obtain the fonts (I just copied all of the .ttf files from a M$ windows computer [located in c:\windows\fonts]) and copy them into /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType directory.
2. As root cd into the directory you copied them into and run the command ttmkfdir . >fonts.scale
3. Run the command mkfontdir .
4. Restart xfs by running the command /etc/init.d/xfs restart
5. Restart your X session [ctr-backspace]
6. To enable Anti-Alias in KDE, tick the "Use Anti-Aliasing for fonts and icons" checkbox in the "Style" page of the "Look and Feel" section of the KDE Control Center. --Beauty!
USB Mouse: I like to use an external (USB) mouse when I'm staying in one place for a while. There's info on how to enable a USB mouse in X while being able to use your built in mouse at the same time over at Horst Meyerdierks Toshiba Sattelite Pro 4600 page.

Obviously this document is a work in progress. I hope the effort I've put in helps you in some way. I think it's important to give back to the Linux community a little of what I have taken. Lord knows I've taken a lot.

If you found this document helpful, please let me know! Again, if you find any inaccuracies or omissions in this document, please drop me a line at james@vantslot.net and kindly point them out to me. Also if you find any better solutions than what I've posted here, send them to me and I'll add them to the document.

Good Luck!