Linux on the Toshiba Portege 3480CT

• Unit bought September 2000 by a friend of mine. Here will my notes that we assembled during the somewhat more than neccesary installation jazs..
• After turning on the laptop one has to go through the obbligatory Windows(98) setup, but this machine came with a severe challenge. By default the screen only showed the central 640x480 portion, but during the part of the installation where Toshiba wanted you to dialin to some 888 number to register your machine, we could not see any buttons how to cancel out of the dialing failures. After some serious trial and error we finally got out of this menu, but without some severe grumping. Total balance, including MS braindead boot-boot-and-boot-again setup: 5 reboots.
• This laptop came with no floppy (well, USB floppy) and no CD-ROM, thus installing linux (we decided on redhat 6.2) could be a challenge.
• Entering the BIOS (hit ESC and then F1) revealed an option that the USB floppy could be turned into legacy mode. With this option turned on (we actually never tried pure USB mode...) the linux bootfloppy started, but a borrowed CD player could not be forced into reading the redhat media (we suspect this to be a redhat problem).... We then decided to copy the redhat CD onto a Jaz drive, and thus we could finally read the install code from Jaz. This eventually was the solution (scaringlgy the same as his previous machine, the Toshiba 7020).
• There is a 10/100 ethernet on the extension port, and it was recognized as an 'eepro100', and worked beautifully (but read below...)
• Upgraded SVGA server that understands this chipset, and also configured the mouse to be IMPS/2, as per Greenwell's instructions (see below).
• Then came the problems:
  • how to select from PCMCIA ethernet and bar ethernet? More-over, if you didn't boot with the port extender attached, it would never be able to use that ethernet. Even with that, we had out share of problems getting this 'external' ethernet to work after a suspend. In the end the solution was to disable the eepro100 from the hardware setup (kudzu does that), and only use networking via a PCMCIA card.
  • could not get button-3 to work in twm, so we went back to E/Gnome.
  • disk suspend did not work, but "apm -s" seemed to do the trick. The solution here was to go into the BIOS and enable "power-on-suspend".
  • did not try sound yet (but may now work through ALSA)
  • on-board modem is supposed to be a Lucent-type WinModem, for which a binary driver is now available for Linux.
  • if you don't bookt with a floppy, even if enabled USB legacy mode, linux will not load drivers for it....
• Other people have also written about this or related units (there may be more links on the Linux Laptop Page since this was written):
  • Portege 3440ct (Ray Greenwell)