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GNU/Linux on a laptop Toshiba Satellite M40X-128

This is a short report about a Mandriva LE 2005 and Ubuntu install tests on a laptop Toshiba Satellite M40X-128. When I had to decide to buy it or do not, I looked for reviews and I did not find any: I would be glad if this page could help...



Introduction

Hardware specifications

Getting started

Installation test: Mandriva LE 2005

Tweaking

Installation test: Ubuntu Linux 5.10 "Breezy Badger"

Installation test: Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake"

Further tweaks

Introduction

On my desktop computer I satisfactorily experienced dual boot management with GRUB, Windows 2000 Professional and Mandrake Linux 10.0. Now it is time to try a laptop that comes with Centrino technology: after several comparisons, my choice had been a Toshiba Satellite Pro M40X not available from my favorite supplier and I decided to buy a Satellite M40X and a Windows XP Professional license. Prices apart, accordingly to Toshiba there are not many differences between the two models:

Satellite M40X-128 Satellite Pro M40X
Intel Pentium 750 1.86 GHz Intel Pentium M 750 1.73 GHz
80 GB hard disk 60 GB hard disk
Windows XP Home Windows XP Professional


Just in case you need to use old scanners, printers, plotters or a direct serial cable connection, please remember that these laptops do not come with a parallel or a serial port :-( It is quite senseless, even for a value laptop...

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Hardware Specifications

Centrino mobile technology with Intel Pentium M 750, Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG (802.11b/g), chipset Intel 915PM Express CPU clock speed 1.86 GHz, Front side bus 533 MHz, L1 cache 32 KB, L2 cache 2048 KB

512 MB DDR RAM in one memory bank

Toshiba MK8025GAS 80 GB hard disk

DVD Super Multi drive (Double layer)

15.4 LCD display Toshiba TruBrite WXGA TFT (1,280 x 800 x 16.7 million colors)

Video adapter: ATI MOBILITY RADEON X300 with 64 MB onboard Video RAM, 16x PCI Express

Network adapter: Realtek 8139 Family Fast Ethernet NIC

Card reader: Texas Instruments Bridge Media Slot 6-in1 (it supports SD Card, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, MultiMedia Card, xD-Picture Card), Texas Instruments PCIxx21 (PCMCIA slot Card type II)

Ports: DC-in, RJ-11, RJ-45, TV-out (s-video), i.LINK (IEEE 1394), headphones, USB 2.0 (2 USB rear ports, 1 USB port on your right hand side)

Modem: international V.90 modem, V.92 ready, 56 Kbps data (V.90) and 14.4 Kbps fax Ethernet

Sound system: Realtek AC'97

Keyboard: 86 keys, 2 Windows keys

Dimensions: 365 x 275 x 29.5 (front) / 37.5 (rear) mm, weight 3.0 kg

Mouse: Alpine PS/2 Touch Pad

Multimedia bar with 4 keys (Forward, Rewind, Play/Pause, Stop)

The hardware specifications seem to be quite GNU/Linux-friendly: only few doubts about the ATI video adapter, the software modem and the 6-in1 card reader. The laptop comes with ACPI power management.

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Getting started

The laptop comes with several hotkeys via the Fn button: i.e. LCD brightness control on 8 levels, suspend to RAM, suspend to disk, touch pad ON/OFF control, sound ON/OFF control, video output. First, a check of the system out of the box is needed: I saved a list of detected hardware and a list of the several preinstalled Toshiba utilities. Few days after the purchase Toshiba provided some hundreds MB of software updates in the web. Unfortunately the laptop came with a broken speaker: in less few days the customer service fixed it.

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Installation test: Mandriva LE 2005

The 80 GB hard disk comes in only one NTFS partition. The install program of Windows XP Professional allowed me to delete the existing NTFS partition and to make a 10 GB NTFS one, named COLUMBIA. After that, the installation goes on smoothly; then I installed the newest drivers available and few Toshiba utilities (power management, DVD acoustic silencer, TruBass sound enhancement, Intervideo DVD movie player). The Toshiba Recovery DVD gives an old Windows 98 bootstrap useful to reboot the system and to make two new FAT32 partitions for data, named DISCOVERY and ENDEAVOUR. The reboot on Windows XP Professional allows formatting the new partitions as FAT32 using the Control panel > Administration tools > Computer management. Then, the new map drive was:

Unit, label Partition type Partition size
C:, COLUMBIA NTFS - boot partition 10 GB
D:, DISCOVERY FAT32 - primary partition 15 GB
E:, ENDEAVOUR FAT32 - logical unit in an extended partition 15 GB


The installation of the distribution Mandriva LE 2005 started smoothly, the PS/2 touch pad was working and a basic USB Logitech optical mouse too. If needed, please refer to the guide http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/installmdv05le.html.

First trouble: the install program did not like too much the SATA hard disk controller, so there was not a recognized hard disk where to install the GNU/Linux distro. As suggested in many forums I chose manually the ata_piix and the installation went on fine.

New partitions can be made with the user-friendly Mandriva graphical interface. Here there is an example of the complete map drive and the specified mount points:

Device Mount point Partition size
sda1 /mnt/win_columbia 10 GB
sda2 /mnt/win_discovery 15 GB
sda5 /mnt/win_endeavour 15 GB
sda6 /boot 100 MB
sda7 / 1 GB
sda8 (Linux swap) 1 GB
sda9 /usr 10 GB
sda10 /var 100 MB
sda11 /home 10 GB
sda12 /tmp 1 GB
sda13 /tux <10 GB


These choices were not so good: please consider that Mandriva LE 2005 warnings at boot time if less than 50 MB are available in the directory /var. The package manager urpmi asks for more free space when an update of packages is done via Mandrake Update; please consider to make room for your /var partition. Instead of a new installation, I lazily chose to move ;-) to the free partition /tux the directories /var/cache, /var/lib, /var/log (as root, in /var I put a symlink for each directory to the target ones in /tux). Consider also to place the free /tux partition right after the FAT32 ones: it could be useful for further resize of partitions and data backup.

The installation test went on fast and in few minutes I had my new laptop working properly. I chose a Flat panel 1280x800 and 16.7 million of color and GRUB as boot manager (Windows XP Professional will not start anymore: please configure properly your /boot/grub/menu.lst file adding a new entry. See the documentation.

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Tweaking

Network adapter, DVD burning, mouse touch pad and sound work out of the box. The LCD is also working fine. However:

- the radeon display driver does not offer 3D enhancement (i.e. in the game Chromium);

- the PS/2 touch pad causes a crash of the X server if the USB Logitech optical mouse is not connected before boot: that does not allow me to go around without the USB mouse at hand. The crash occurs also if the touch pad is disabled via Fn + touch pad hotkey;

- accordingly to the Mandrake Control Center, the Pentium M 750 is rated 798 MHz (battery mode) or 1.86 GHz (power adapter in use, the fan is always on, but with a variable speed);

- accordingly to the Mandrake Control Center, the sound system is recognized as AC'97 ICH6 family, driver snd-intel8x0. It just works;

- the Toshiba software modem and the Texas Instruments card reader do not work: it does not really matter, but hardware vendors should offer a proper support. About disappointing Toshiba's explanation, see http://linux.toshiba-dme.co.jp/linux/eng/reference.htm.

I did not try the wireless support and the firewire port: the status of these peripherals seems to be all right, anyway. I disabled some services like bluetooth (a selection of the running services could be done during the installation).

My pendrive (1 partition FAT32 of 128 MB) and my external USB 2.0 Kraun DataPocket hard disk drive (2 partitions FAT32 of 40 GB each) work both correctly: the GNOME desktop manager places them on the desktop when hot plugged and unmounts them correctly. Also the transfer of files from my Fuji Finepix S5000 digital camera works fine.

The following further tweaks are needed:

- software LCD brightness control (?) and to get acpid and cpufreqd working properly (the cpufreq modules fail to unload during shutdown);

- get PS/2 touch pad working without X server crashes (i.e. without USB mouse connected at boot time);

- provide 3D support using proprietary ATI drivers (will the X300 Mobility ever be supported?);

- test wireless and firewire stuffs;

- test suspend to RAM and suspend to disk (Fn + hotkeys are available, but they obviously won't work out of the box).

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Installation test: Ubuntu Linux 5.10 "Breezy Badger"

The Ubuntu Linux 5.10 "Breezy Badger" Live CD boots correctly, then the system crashes with a dark empty screen. The same problem occurred with the previous 5.04 "Hoary Hedgehog". Just a reboot CTRL+ALT+DEL is needed. Workaround: launch at the Ubuntu prompt live vga=771, then the hardware detection goes on smoothly, fullscreen and sound (ICH6) are readily available. The GNOME desktop is simply great!

Note In Ubuntu Linux 5.10 the hybernate command in the shutdown dialog box does not work and the computer shuts down instead. Then the existing Linux swap partition has not been activated at Mandriva LE 2005 boot time. Workaround: just enter the Mandrakelinux Control Center and format (carefully) the swap partition. Reboot. Done.

Before to install the Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" I resized the partitions:

Device Mount point Partition size
sda1 /mnt/win_columbia 10 GB
sda2 /mnt/win_discovery 15 GB
sda5 /mnt/win_endeavour 15 GB
sda6 / 5 GB
sda7 (Linux swap) 1 GB
sda8 /usr 10 GB
sda9 /home 10 GB
sda10 /tux <8 GB


The installation test went on fine and finally I had my GNU/Linux system working. About the stuffs not fixed, see the notes above for Mandriva LE 2005; the two distro offered amost the same peripherals support. No problems with the Synaptic packages manager until the release of the 6.06 Long Term Support edition...

Note I experienced twice a crash at boot time, while USB modules were loading: 'Initializing USB controller (ehci-hcd)...'. The laptop froze and I had to remove the battery from its slot. A similar problem occurred only once with the GRUB boot manager, a reboot after a Windows system update.

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Installation test: Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake"

At the release of the first Long Term Support edition I tested the update of the 5.10 via the Synaptic Packages Manager. It failed, damn! Something went wrong, probably related to kernel tricks...I downloaded and burned the ISO image of the new 6.06 "Dapper Drake" and I had to made a new installation.

No fear, no troubles! In few minutes I had a working GNOME desktop again! I used the previous partitions scheme and I installed the distro without problems. The stuff not fixed remained the same :-( Anyway the 6.06 is still my favourite Ubuntu Linux release: nice power management, smooth and easy working. ^top

Further tweaks

I tested the wireless support of Ubuntu Linux 6.06 with a friend's home made wireless network. The WPA protocol was required, so the wpasupplicant package were also required. I had to google for a while and I found an useful help in the following documentation: WPA on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS and WPA How To. In few minutes of editing the file /etc/network/interfaces, set a free static IP and a correct DNS, I was able to surf, stop and restart the wireless connection in the GNOME notification area. Wow!

This page last updated: May 17, 2007  ^top