TuxMobil: Fedora Linux Core 3 on the Toshiba Tecra A4 Laptop

Abstract

This document describes the installation of Fedora Core 3 on a Toshiba Tecra A4 laptop. I post this in hope that it will be useful for someone, with all the usual disclaimers. The short version is: Not everything works pretty well. There are many hurdles to run Linux, and you will end with an notebook running not well with Linux yet.

Output of `lspci'

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. Mobile Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. Mobile Memory Controller Hub PCI Express Port (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 04)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 04)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 04)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 04)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 04)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 04)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 04)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d4)
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Con[..]
00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 04)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Radeon Mobility M300]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Marvell Yukon 88E8053 \
        Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter (rev 15)
06:04.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)
06:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8031
06:06.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8032
06:06.3 Unknown mass storage controller: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8033
06:06.4 Class 0805: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8034

Installation

The installation of Fedora Core 3 runs without bigger problems, with the stock-kernel you will have no WLAN, LAN, speedstepping and no PCMCIA support after restart. Be aware the harddisk is named /dev/sda because it's a serial-ATA disk. USB will work "out of the box", so if you have an USB-to-LAN adapter like the D-Link DSB 650 TX you are able to update your Linux. If not, you have to burn the updates to a CD. WLAN will work after the update to the new Kernel 2.6.11 from Fedora, but if you want more you have to build your own Kernel. :-) At the time of writing my kernel works fine except ACPI because of a buggy DSTD. I tried to fix them but without success, there are to many errors inside. Unfortunately there is no BIOS-Update available at this time.

To get LAN, WLAN and PCMCIA working, I build a Vanilla Linux Kernel 2.6.11.9 with following patches:

IPW2200 Driver for Linux , Version: 1.0.4, Date: May 17, 2005.

Marvell/SysKonnect Gigabit Ethernet driver v8.18.2.2 (beta).

acpi-20050408-2.6.11.diff . Disable ACPI by using the boot option acpi=off. This solution prevents powermanagement and hotkeys from working under Linux. But without the hardware wont work.

Otherwise, by enabling ACPI you get the possibility to read the charge-states of the battery (/proc/acpi/battery/) and to set special-key events (by using /proc/acpi/events). But remember: the Marvel Lan-adapter, speedstepping, PCMCIA slot and the serial port wont work then.

We tried the boot option pci=noacpi, now we could load the drivers without errors and configure the devices, but they still didn't work.

Display

If you want to have a sharper resolution of your display try my configuration file below. Fedora will not find a well graphical resolution automatically, because the build-in display has a resolution of 1280x800 dots. If you want to use the VGA-out for presentations (i.e. external monitor or beamer) set your resolution to 1024x768 and restart X. Without doing so you will see some nice stripes but no pictures. A restart of the laptop is not necessary to use the external VGA-out.

Other Resources

This report is a courtesy of Lutz Willek.

Appendix: /etc/X11/xorg.conf

# XFree86 4 configuration created by pyxf86config,
# modifications by Lutz Willek. Please configure
# a resolution of 1.280x800 from your GUI to get
# best results.

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "Default Layout"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
	InputDevice    "Synaptics" "AlwaysCore"
EndSection

Section "Files"
	RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
	FontPath     "unix/:7100"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "fbdevhw"
	Load  "glx"
	Load  "record"
	Load  "freetype"
	Load  "type1"
	Load  "synaptics"
	Load  "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
	Option	    "XkbModel" "pc105"
	Option	    "XkbLayout" "de"
	Option	    "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Mouse0"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
	Option	    "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Synaptics"
	Driver      "synaptics"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option	    "Protocol" "auto-dev"
	Option	    "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "Monitor0"
	VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
	ModelName    "LCD Panel 1280x800"
	HorizSync    31.5 - 64
	VertRefresh  59-76
	Option	     "IgnoreEDID" "1" 
	Modeline     "1280x800@60" 83.91 1280 1312 1624 1656 800 816 824 841
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "radeon"
	VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
	BoardName   "ATI Radeon Mobility M300"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Videocard0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     16
		Modes    "1280x800@60" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
		Modes    "1600x1200" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1280x800@60" \\
                         "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
	Group        0
	Mode         0666
EndSection