![[Photo: Portégé overview]](images/pinguin.jpg)
The Toshiba Portégé 7020 CT has a 1024x768 display, a
Pentium II 366 MHz processor, and is incredibly slim and
light-weight. It fulfills all important laptop critery: powerful -- at least at
the time of purchase -- and cute. ;-)
The Toshiba Portégé 7020 CT has a 1024x768 display, a
Pentium II 366 MHz processor, and is incredibly slim and
light-weight. It fulfills all important laptop critery: powerful -- at least at
the time of purchase -- and cute. ;-)
![[Photo: multi-purpose laptop]](images/fruehstueck.jpg)
The Portégé has a very handy size. In particular, it is so flat
it leaves lots of room for other things in a laptop case. It can even serve as
a breakfast dish if you are in a hurry -- while calculating the final data
points for your talk.
There is a suite of utilities for Toshiba laptops at
http://www.buzzard.org.uk/toshiba/.
By the way: I found out that the keyboard is very sensitive to spilled tea. The
slightest amount of fluid is sufficient to generate random key signals which
make work difficult or impossible. So be careful ...
I have the following hints for DVD playback.
If one has XFree86 older than 4.3.0 but 4.x then there is the neomagic_drv.o module with xv extension that can be downloaded from the mplayer site: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/contrib/NeoMagic-driver/
There is also info about another speed up patch for 4.3.0 : http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/devices.html#neomagic
If your playback is still jumpy then you should check the DVD drive settings
with hdparm. This setting helped me:
hdparm -c3 -d1 -u1 /dev/hdc
I have Mandrake 9.2 loaded with Xine and Mplayer. I resolved the problem of choppy DVD play back by finding information on the NeoMagic chip set on the Xfree86 webpage. I had to add this line to the Options in the XF86Config file:
Option "OverlayMem" "829440"This means: Reserve the given amount of memory (in bytes) for the XVideo overlay. On boards with limited memory, display of large XVideo buffers might fail due to insufficient available memory. Using this option solves the problem at the expense of reducing the memory avilable for other operations. For full-resolution DVDs, 829440 bytes (720x576x2) are necessary. This is found at http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/neomagic.4.html
After I did this, the xv module worked perfect and the DVD play back worked excellent.
I am using Debian 2.2 (kernel 2.2.19, pcmcia-cs 3.1.29) with the following setup you might find interesting:
Socket 0: product info: "FREECOM", "PCCARD-IDE", "REV836" Socket 1: product info: "ELSA", "AirLancer MC-11", "Version 01.01", ""The Freecom cable goes to a Ricoh 6020 combined DVD/CD-RW drive. Burning CDs goes without problems. It is accessed as a SCSI drive by the following chain of drivers:
ide_cs -> ide-scsi -> sr_modTogether with an Elsa DSL / WLAN router, the Elsa WLAN card gives a very comfortable internet connection.
I got a Portege 7020CT, found the vesafb horribly slow, and I found: http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0104.0/att-0658/01-neofb-0.2-patch-2.4.3.bz2 Scrolling up is still horrible, but for the rest it's pretty ok.
I run Debian potato and usually compile my own stuff, whenever I can. I noticed that
allows me to
I just thought you might want to know... with the Toshiba PCMCIA chipset fixed, and the sound more or less working as intented, we're getting one step closer to having one of the best laptops to run Linux on!
What's missing: opensource Lucent modem driver, hibernation (still no hibernation in Linux :-/ ) and maybe a module to use the DVD docking station mpeg accelerator... that would be uber-cool! :-)
PS: If you want to compile your own kernel, check-out my
config file: when you type make
menuconfig in the linux directory and go to 'load alternate
configuration', type in tosh.config to load this file;
that should compile you a kernel similar to the one I use on my
laptop.
I had some trouble with the PCMCIA card and thought I would share the solution with others...
Initially, the laptop would hang up during initialization when the kernel attempted to load the pcmcia module. To fix this, we entered the BIOS (hit [ESC] during startup) and changed the PCMCIA controller to CardBus 16-bit mode, and everything works great.
I used the boardname setting:
BoardName "Toshiba Tecra 750DVD"for my Toshiba 7020 CT and it worked great ... Download XF86Config file.
I'm installing FreeBSD 4.0 and NetBSD 1.4.2 on my other laptops which are also Toshiba Portégés 7020 CT and hopefully I won't have to change the XF86Config settings at all but who knows :-) Will send you the XF86Config files after I get those up and running!
Robert Blacquiere <portege@guldan.demon.nl> has good news concerning the IrDA and USB devices.
I have experimented with the IrDA device (I have a Siemens S25 mobile phone). It works with the toshoboe driver in the newer 2.2.1x kernels with the latest IrDA utils (0.9.9, I think).
Also the USB port works. I received a dynalink USB web cam (only 320x200) with the notice on the box "Windows 98 ONLY". I could not stand the temptation to get it to work on my Linux box ;-). Let me say it works !!! I used the backport from 2.3.99 USB into the 2.2.15 kernel. And used the cpia drivers. There are links on the USB project web page.
So I have everything working on this laptop. Oh yeah the win modem doesn't work, because I don't trust binary only drivers into the kernel without the source.
Kevin Kealy, <kbkealy@att.com> was kind enough to share info about his success with the built-in modem:
I've been getting my Portégé to work with Red Hat Linux 6.1, and the Lucent (binary-only) modem driver for the built-in winmodem works great.
Go to the Linux on Laptops page and follow the links. I did this:
Went to the linmodems.org
page, got the Lucent driver:
linux568.zip
mv linux568.zip /usr/local/src/drivers/
cd !$
mkdir ltmodem
cd !$
unzip ../linux568.zip
There's a readme. To install, type
./ltinst
ls -l /dev/modem now shows a link to the new character
device ttyS14.
If you've enabled PCMCIA support (I have) and may insert a PCMCIA modem, I suggest doing this:
ln -s /dev/ttyS14 /dev/ltmodem
so you don't lose the symlink when the card services insert your PCMCIA modem.
Testing:
cu -l /dev/modem (goes to blank screen) at OK ... etc...
Works great. Saves a PCMCIA slot.
A brief note on the soundcard: After compiling and installing the module
maestro.o, I had no sound yet, but no error messages, either. It
turned out that a module sound.o was missing. I compiled my own
kernel and included both "sound suppport" (this produces the module
soundcore.o) and "OSS drivers" (without choosing a
specific driver) which gave me the module sound.o. After
installing the new kernel and modules, and another modprobe
maestro, all three modules were inserted (and did their job fine).
I tried to set the soundcard to an interrupt_line other than 11.
However, after reboot it took 11 again. Surprisingly, it works -- despite all
my PCI devices sitting on IRQ 11.
My machine is running Linux (currently SuSE 6.2 / kernel 2.2.10) exclusively; no other operating system modifying the IRQs. Thus, your mileage may vary.
I have now some weeks the portege 7020CT in use. Great machine. There were a couple of small problems with it, but now "all" resolved.
First the sound worked. It is detected as Maestro 2e. APM of the card does not work so unload module before suspend. On my machine all pci devices are on the same IRQ (11), so I had some lockups. I used setpci to set at least the interrupt_line to another.
I had some problems with the pcmcia stuff but the pcmcia-cs-3.1.x seem to work. I have USB support and FIR support not tested yet but will mail you as soon as they seem to work.
I have found a newer driver for the maestro 2e soundcard. The link is http://people.redhat.com/~zab/maestro/.
I successfully use wmtoshiba which controls the cooling fan. I have also tried xtuxtime but it did not work.
Oh I use slackware current on my machine (5/6 beta I think). I have also removed all windows software from the disk since I don't understand m$.
Currently, Toshiba does not officially support Linux. Nevertheless, Toshiba Europe provides a page with Linux / Unix information: http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de
Robert Blacquiere
portege@guldan.demon.nl
Jim Dai <dai@isye.gatech.edu> emailed me with lots of additional info on the Portégé 7020 CT which I want to share here.
I installed RedHat 6.0. I bought the DVD/CD docking station. So installing Linux from a CD is very easy. The ethernet card (Intel EtherExpress Pro) on the docking station works. Adding the line
alias eth0 eepro100in
/etc/conf.modules does the job. Note you need power
to use the ethernet through docking. Battery power will not work.
Regarding X in 24 bpp, I did not notice any slow down as compared with 16 bpp mode as you mentioned in your message. I was using the new X driver for NM 2200 from RedHat that comes with RedHat 6.0. The XFree version, as of July 99, does not support the chip to the fullest extent yet. Go to the Laptop page; there are a couple of links on this. In particular, see the section about X servers. However, Adobe Acrobat version 3 (and 4) does not work under 24 bpp, so I changed the server back to 16 bpp.
Apparently, there is a Portégé mailing list operated on onelist.com. I went there. It is a very helpful / useful list. To subscribe, follow this link.
The Internal modem is a Mwave / Winmodem type. Therefore, it is not working with Linux.
The soundcard is a PCI ESS Maestro 1/2 card. OSS has released a beta version of a sound driver supporting it. Have a look at http://www.4front-tech.com/linux-x86.html for the current information.
A useful tip to those want to have win98 and Linux simultaneously: Reinstalling win98 would NOT do. It will take over the entire harddisk again even if you have Linux installed already. Use FIP 2.0 (in dosutils in RedHat CD) to partition an existing FAT32 disk. It worked for me and many others.
J. G. "Jim" Dai
http://www.isye.gatech.edu/faculty/dai/
If you want to use a floppy or CD drive you have to carry them along separately and attach them to your laptop. The floppy drive is sold together with the laptop; the CD (or a DVD) drive can be bought separately. I did not buy the CD / DVD drive since I don't need it.
The laptop comes with pre-installed Windoze 95 or 98. The documentation says that upon first bootup, you have to choose one of them, and the other one will be deleted. It also comes with a CD with Windoze 95/98 and a floppy disk with Toshiba drivers to restore the basis system after a crash. In order to use this CD, you need to boot from the CD drive (so you have to buy the extra CD drive!). The handbook says using the restore CD will delete everything on your hard disk. I cannot tell you more about this pre-installed stuff since the first thing I did was booting from a Linux floppy disk and re-formatting the hard disk to ext2fs.
I installed SuSE Linux 6.0 via NFS (kernel 2.0.36). Not because I am particularly font of this particular distribution, but it was at hand. In order to use NFS, you need to get the network services to work. With SuSE's linuxrc, choose "load kernel modules" from the menu, next "PCMCIA". This worked fine for me--the PCMCIA adapter was auto-detected. After the PCMCIA services had been successfully started, I inserted the PCMCIA network card. The borrowed 3COM Etherlink III 3C589C was detected with a beep and worked fine. Next, I told Yast (SuSE's setup tool) to install via NFS. It prompts for the IP address, etc., to configure the eth0 device, and then mounts the specified directory from the server. From then on, the installation goes as usual.
Please note that PCMCIA only worked after I had changed the BIOS setting to "PCIC compatible". To enter the BIOS setup, hold down the "ESC" key during bootup. The setting for PCMCIA is on page two (you get there with the "PageDown" key). If you cannot modify this option, change "Device Configuration" from "Setup by OS" to "All Devices" first.
You might want to check the other BIOS settings, too. On my laptop, someone had set the processor speed to "low" and turned the fan off.
Unfortunately, I could not make work the Xircom network card (CreditCard Ethernet 10/100-Ready) I purchased together with the laptop upon recommendation by the salesperson. However, it might be supported by now; I had no time yet to try again. You can get a driver for Xircom cards at http://ivs.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~danilo/linux.shtml.
If you like working in text mode as I do, this is for you.
The BIOS has an option named "LCD display stretch". When disabled,
only the middle of the screen is used in text mode. When enabled, the font is
stretched to fill the whole screen. In default 80x25 mode, this looks awful,
but after setting up SVGATextMode, I now have a nice 120x48 screen. My settings
for SVGATextMode (the relevant lines from /etc/TextConfig) are as
follows:
Chipset "VGA" Clocks 25.175 28.322 45 50 FontSelect "lat1u-16.psf.gz" 8x16 9x16 8x15 9x15 9x20 "120x48x9" 50 960 961 962 963 768 770 772 800 font 9x15
The latter two clocks are chosen more or less randomly to go with the resolutions I experimented with. The LCD display is not picky about clocks. The "120x48x9" mode is not from the default TextConfig file but the result of some hours of experimenting.
To activate the higher resolution text mode at boot time, you have to configure
your startup scripts. For example, with the SuSE distribution, edit your
/etc/rc.config like this:
CONSOLE_FONT="lat1u-16.psf.gz" SVGATEXTMODE="120x48x9"From the font here and above you can tell that I am in Germany and want umlauts on my screen. Depending on where you live, you'll probably prefer another lat*u-16.psf.gz font (or a completely different one).
Configuring the X server was no problem. I installed the standard SVGA server and configured it for a standard SVGA card and monitor with the (only) resolution 1024x768. The mouse point behaves as a PS/2 mouse. The video memory was correctly auto-detected as 2560 kB. In case you need it, here is my XF86Config file.
In 24 bit mode, my X server worked but was rather slow (I could watch the xterms scrolling). With 16 bit color depth, the X server is working fine. You can specify the color depth via the file .xserverrc in your home directory (i.e. this is user specific). Mine contains only the following line:
exec Xwrapper :0 -bpp 16As an alternative, you can also delete the 32 and 24 bit mode from
/etc/XF86Config if you want to.
I have not yet tried to use the soundcard or the modem built into the laptop. When I have news to tell (bad or good), I'll mention them here.
For more information and other users' reports about using Linux on mobile computers, have a look at these sites: