What gave me the greatest grief in installing Linux on this machine is booting it into something other than Windows XP to begin with. Many thanks to Torsten's Portege 3480ct install page which had lots of information which also applied to the Portege 2000.

1. Getting into BIOS
2. Booting from network
3. Booting from USB CD-ROM
4. Booting from PCMCIA CD-ROM
5. Attaching the hard drive elsewhere?
6. Booting from USB floppy

Booting from network
Originally I had planned to do my install via a network boot. I was unsuccessful at getting a PXE server running and communicating with the laptop. If anyone else out there has done this, e-mail me and I'll link the information for anyone out there. Note: one year later, I have had nobody tell me how to do a network boot. Toshiba techs haven't been exactly forthcoming, either.

Booting from USB CD-ROM
Doesn't work. No dice.

Booting from PCMCIA CD-ROM
On the Compuserve forum, one of the Toshiba Techs claimed that only a very few PCMCIA CD-Rs will boot, like the one that Toshiba sells with the drive. The one they sell with the drive is a Port Noteworthy 24x CD-ROM. I don't know if their claim is true, but I'm dubious. I purchased a 24x CD-ROM from Teac, and it boots just fine. If other people will e-mail me with boot experiences from a variety of manufacturers, perhaps we can debunk the "only this CD-R works". And I do suspect that it's bunk.

That being said, not all Linux boot CDs will work as install CDs. And why is that? Well, the long and short of it is that some of them don't load the PCMCIA drivers immediately in the boot process (or something like that), so while they'll boot, they won't boot into anything useful, as they are unable to mount the CD with the initial driver set. At least I think that's what the problem is; I may be wrong. Who knows?

• The Gentoo boot CD 1.4_rc4 didn't work for me.
• Sadly, neither did Knoppix v3.2.
• Red Hat 9.2 finally worked.

• Attaching the hard drive elsewhere
  You can't do it (yet). The laptop is so small because it's not a regular 2.5" laptop harddrive inside. It's smaller; it's 1.8" (and possibly thinner as well). So that standard 2.5" --> regular IDE, install on desktop won't work. Neither will it work to throw the drive in another laptop and boot there.

  At least I think this won't work--I haven't actually opened up my laptop to check that the interface is actually different. It might not be. Maybe I'll do that later today.

  Booting from USB floppy
  This is the only thing I did that works ... conditionally. If you don't want to buy a USB floppy (like me), borrow one from a friend. This is by far the easiest solution. I say it works conditionally because it will only boot from a 1.44 MB formatted floppy. Anything larger (eg 1.7 MB) doesn't boot. This means that tomsrtbt won't boot. To make a bootdisk from a disk image, I used dd if=put-floppy-image-filename-here of=/dev/FD01440. Here's the boot disks I tried which worked:
  

  • Originally, I resized my XP partition using Bootit Next Generation which has a free 30 day trial. However, I was recently contacted by Rick Moen who has worked on NTFS tools for Linux, and I am delighted to be able to say that there are open source NTFS utilities which make resizing NTFS partitions possible. Rick Moen, who was kind enough to alert me to this, covers it. As does Szabolcs Szakacsits. This is included on the Knoppix CD (which is no use, I tell you, no use to us! at least not for the purposes of installing Linux on this laptop) as well as the Linux-Mandrake CD (which may well be of some use--I'll test this out later). It's also in gentoo's portage tree.
  • ramflop works. It contains enough file utilities for you to create new partitions. It doesn't have network support.
  • Trinux will boot but the keyboard acted strangely.
  • For my original install, I needed to be able to boot into something with network support. Luckily, RedHat's network boot disk will do this. You can find it at any RedHat mirror under the version, then the images directory. It's called netboot.img (I think). If you want to install RedHat, this is the way to go. My gentoo solution was extremely inelegant (Ideally, you want a boot floppy that just has ftp/chroot on it so you can skip my minimalist install--but I couldn't find such a beast. Any ideas, anyone?). I ended up doing a really minimalist install of RH through network. I then used ftp to grab the gentoo stage 1 tarball. I had the following partitions set up:

    /dev/hda1 100 MB ext3 /boot partition
    /dev/hda2 ~15 GB ext3 blank (for gentoo installation)
    /dev/hda3 ~3 GB ext3 partition with RH on it
    /dev/hda4 ~500MB VFAT partition (for suspend to disk, which doesn't work yet)
    /dev/hda5 ~500MB linux swap partition

    I mounted /dev/hda2 on /mnt/gentoo and /dev/hda1 on /mnt/gentoo/boot, unpacked the tarball, chrooted in (as in step 9 of the Gentoo Installation instructions) and then completed the gentoo install afterwards. Afterwards, I overwrote /dev/hda4/ and mounted it as /home on my system.

  • At some later date, I realized I needed to install Windows XP. Although this makes me gag and cough, my goal is to make it possible to use Linux in an environment heavily dominated by Windows--the University of Michigan Law School. On my second install, I couldn't use the method described above, because I had moved to my new apartment in Ann Arbor, in a house which shares wireless networking. I didn't actually have ethernet cable. What I did this time around was install Windows XP with the god-awful restore disks (how many times do you really need to restart the bloody computer? sheesh). Then I used the Red Hat CDs to minimally install Red Hat, enough so that I could get the wireless networking working. And then I once again chrooted into the gentoo installation process. For reference purposes, it takes longer than 24 hours to compile kde with this laptop.
  To sum up my not-so-vast experience here, if you want to install Linux of any variant on the Portege 2000, get a USB floppy or a PCMCIA CDROM.

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  This document last modified July 16, 2003
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