July 10th, 1998
Let me just warn you now... this is not a step-by-step guide. Please read through the entire document before starting to install Linux. This page describes as many of my failures as it does my successes. If you follow what I did to the letter, you will not be learning from my mistakes.
Finally, a real operating system for your PC.
I always wanted to install Linux, but I left my DELL Desktop in San Francisco, so all I have is my Toshiba laptop. I did a little reasearch and found that installing it on a laptop isn't entirely without precedence. There are a number of webpages on that very subject, and many have detailed, machine-specific instructions. Of course, my model, the Toshiba Satellite Pro 220 CDS wasn't one of them. There were a few that were close, but not the 220. Typical! If you want to see if your model is covered, check http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html.
The Machine:
- Toshiba Satellite Pro 220 CDS
- 1.6(?) Gigabyte
- 32 Mb RAM
- Xircom CEM56 10/100Mbit Ethernet and 56k Modem combo PCMCIA card
The 220 is a pretty good machine, though I've had some problems with it. I was running Windows 95 on a single partition and didn't really want to futz with splitting that partition 'on the fly' using utilities that I know are available to do this. But when I really thought through how much work would be involved in rebuilding my machine after a full fdisk and re-format, I decided to try it. I didn't get very far.
I couldn't get the defrag program to run on Windows 95. It would get a precentage of the way in, report that the contents of the drive had changed, and start again from 0%. Very frustrating. It got about as far as 42%, but never much farther, and I tried it for several hours one time. I disabled and then deinstalled McAfee virus scanner, but something was still altering the disk. I even tried it in safe mode, but without success. I should probably check on MicroSoft's site to see if it's been reported. It probably has because I think I saw the same problem using scandisk on a machine at work. Who knows.
Anyway, I decided I couldn't wait any longer, so I bit the bullet one weekend and started backing up a bunch of stuff, ready for the big flush. Looking back, I could have done a better job. I completely forgot to do my AOL address book and mail folder. All gone. Ah well. <Sigh>.
RedHat Linux v4.2
I read that Red Hat's distribution has modules for advanced power management for laptops, so this is the one I chose. I bought a cheap book with the 4.2 Red Hat linux included on a CD in the back. The book pretty much sucked, but hey, a free copy of the world's best (free) operating system. Much better books are available, but this was the only one I could find that came with RedHat, and it was less than $30.
Disk Quandary
In my many years of working with PCs, I have come to learn how easy it is to paint yourself into a corner when it comes to 'getting down to the metal'. When you reformat your hard-disk, you're often faced with that realization that you no longer have the tools available to get back to a working OS install. Careful planning avoids most of this kind of stuff, but even so, I often find myself having to do a bunch of funky things to get stuff to work. I came up against an interesting one this time around.
The 220 comes with a floppy drive and a cd-rom, but the two are interchangeable, and you can only connect both at the same time with an extra peripheral that doesn't come with the machine. When I first bought the 220, these external floppy drive casings were practically impossible to get. I was quoted well over $100 for one, and it's just an empty plastic box with a connector inside and a cable that plugs into the side of the computer.
What this means is that you can't install Linux without already having a bootable partition on your hard disk. The RedHat distribution comes on a CD, but if you wipe out your hard drive you have to boot from a floppy, and if you've booted from a floppy, you don't have the CD-Rom installed. The two are not hot-swappable. Get the picture? I don't know if it's possible to boot from a CD-Rom. It may be possible on this machine, but I don't know if the RedHat CD is a system disk. It didn't look like it.
Well, as it happened I was going to be putting Windows 95 back on anyway, so I just had to do it sooner rather than later.
I booted from floppy and fdisk'ed the drive into a smaller partition; a 640Mb for Windows, the rest for Linux. I don't think I created the second partition with fdisk. I think you're supposed to use the Linux partition utility for that. I just created one 640Mb partition and exited.
I fought for a while to get the c-drive to boot after reformatting it because I forgot to set the partition as Active within fdisk. Then you have to format the partition using the option that moves the system files so the machine will boot. Now you can turn it off, pop out the a-drive, slide in the CD-Rom, and reboot, and it should boot off of your newly formatted C: partition.
Now, if you remembered to save the drivers for your CD-Rom, you can add them to config.sys and autoexec.bat, reboot, and you can see the Linux CD-Rom as your D: drive. My 220 came with a disk from Toshiba that makes the CD-Rom installation for DOS easy. You can get pretty much all the software for any Toshiba model from their website.
Now you can run the Linux installation program. My CD came with an autoboot batch file that runs loadlin and points it to a minimal Linux Kernel on the CD. This takes control from DOS and boots you into Linux then runs the installation program.
I won't go into the actual installation here. It's relatively straightforward as long as you have good documentation to walk you through it. The fun part is using the partition program, which is still a command-line utility. It looks really stupid as you pop from the brightly-colored "Jeez, this is going to be EASY" RedHat wizard screens into this intimidating black and white UNIX program that's asking you to type in single-letter commands and numbers so it can write a boot sector table to the Master Boot Record of your hard disk. If you actually had live data on your Windows partition, this is the bit you really don't want to get wrong. If you blow it, I have the number of a really good data recovery place up in Canada.
Like I said, if the documentation is good, you'll be fine. You actually set up two partitions in the free disk space, one for swap space (virtual memory) and the other for the OS. Then you pick the packages you want to install and away you go.
Or not, as the case may be. I installed everything, then got to the part where I install LILO so you can boot the machine into one or more operating systems, and things started going wrong. The installation program didn't give me much in the way of flexibility to try things again, and pretty soon I was unrecoverably lost. Needless to say, the machine would not boot Linux, though I think it came back to DOS without a problem.
I tried again to no avail and started again. This time, I stopped at a notice I just flew by the first time. When you run fdisk, it gives you a message about 'Large Disk-Drive Support'. The first time I picked YES. I'm assuming this means that it gives you support for Windows 95 32-bit FAT file system. It mentions that this support might cause problems with other OS's. So this time I picked NO and started again from scratch; fdisk, format, reboot, install cd, reboot, run Linux install...
This time Lilo went in fine, and pretty soon I was looking at a login prompt on one of 6 virtual terminals. I love Linux. From then on I edited the right files to get it to mount all of my disks. You can have it mount the floppy and cd-rom drives automatically, and it doesn't complain if either is missing. It will also mount the DOS partition without a problem.
X-Windows
I'd gotten this far with a Slackware distribution on a desktop some years ago, but got completely stuck on the X-windows support. I love UNIX, but it's not my strong suit. Luckily the Toshiba uses a popular video chipset that's common to thousands of Laptops, so the support is good. RedHat comes with a simple question and answer setup program that generates a valid startup file for X. It boots initially to an ugly-looking 320x200x256 resolution that's horrible. It looks a bit like Windows95 Safe Mode, and scrolls all over the place when you move the mouse because the virtual desktop area is several times larger than the screen. It took me a while to get out of this mode. To bump up to higher resolutions, you need to press Ctrl, Alt and the + key on the number pad. Of course, on the 220 you need to use the Fn key to turn the pad on. For some reason, this didn't work for me for a while. I don't know what I did, but it 'fixed itself'. Once you can get up to the higher resolution, X-Windows is much nicer to use.
The Important Stuff
I love Linux. It's scary that all these MicroSoft users don't know what a real operating system is, and that it really is unacceptable to pay for an OS that crashes constantly. I had four, count them, FOUR windows up running DOOM at 30 frames per second. 95 probably wouldn't even do two, and if it did, it would thrash horrible for about ten minutes. It may be imagination, but I think that Quake ran slightly faster under Linux. The nice thing is you can just install the Linux executable and point it to the id1 directory on your DOS partition.
Administration
This is kind of where I ran out of steam. I don't know enough about unix admin to set up a decent user account, so I'm still using root, which is pretty risky. Also, you can spend an entire lifetime discovering and configuring X-Windows. There's a lot to learn. As it happens, I reinstalled Windows 95 and haven't booted Linux in a while. Linux is great for hackers because you can learn so much about an Unix just trying to do simple things like install a modem. There's a PCMCIA module, and there's even drivers for my Xircom card, but I'm already staring Kernel compilation in the face. I'm a programmer, and that shit still scares me. Like I said, it's just a matter of finding the time to learn, and that's the real joy of Linux.
Back to Windows 95
The last thing I want to mention today is that a reinstallation of Windows 95 wipes out LILO. So suddenly you can't get back into Linux. Don't panic. You can fix that easily. Uh, I don't remember exactly how I did it. There are instructions in the LILO mini-HOWTO. I'm going to go home and boot to get more details on this and other things so I can continue this page in the near future. I'll write up how I did it when I get round to it. I also want to write up a review of that book I bought, 'cos it really sucked.
I also want to write up how I fare when I get round to installing all my peripherals, namely the PCMCIA network / modem card, my Zip Drive, and my Color QuickCam. I know for a fact that drivers exist for all three. It's just a matter of getting it together one day. I don't know if I'll ever be able to use Linux as my main OS (my DOS Partition is already straining under the weight of all that MicroSoft code bloat) but I can always dream.
August 28th, 1998
I finally found some time (while I've been sick) to revisit the linux installation on my laptop. With a bit of investigation and patience, I've started to win through.
The Right Packages
I became really frustrated with the book I bought, Discover Linux because it described a ton of stuff, like xfishtank and xtetris that clearly wasn't on my system. I'm certain that I answered a resounding "yes" to any and all games to be installed during the setup process, but nothing was there. The book also described a ton of useful looking editors and image maniupulators. None of it was there.
| Format: | Paperback, 438pp. |
| ISBN: | 0764531050 |
| Publisher: | IDG Books Worldwide |
| Pub. Date: | January 1997 |
Using the RedHat package manager, I selected everything I could find that looked useful, plus all the games I could find. This process took a long time - searching through the packages, querying each to see what it was, selecting or deselecting them. When I was finished I clicked to Install and nothing happened. Even more frustrating.
Being God
It seems there's a lot of stuff you should only do as Root, and package management is one of those things. You get a message when trying to change system time that you can only do this as root, but other things just silently won't work.
So I logged in as root and started doing the package thing one at a time, which took even longer, but worked fine. Now I have all those things on my system - xfishtank, xearth, xtetris, xview, blah blah. It's really cool. Linux looks great and performs great. I pretty much installed everything in the book apart from the internet servers. There's a really cool performance monitor that even shows which IRQ's are being lit. It's fun to watch CPU use skyrocket when you fire up XDoom. And the screensavers are awesome. After my initial frustration, I'm back to loving Linux. It still amazes me how little disk activity there is. Even after opening a lot of windows, I was still only using a tiny, tiny fraction of swap space. Windoze95 would have worn out my hard-drive by now.
HOW-TO
One of the paradoxes involved with installing Linux is that all the documentation is on the internet, so if you're not already at the point where you can log on and fire up a browser, you're a little in the dark. As it happens, getting that far is a major achievement, virtually impossible without documentation. Luckily, the installation CD-Roms come with a lot of documentation. The trick is that you need to install the right viewers to read them. Without a browser, reading HTML documents becomes painful. So once I installed these X viewers, things got easier. I'm using ghostview to read postscript files.
Configurating X
I didn't have much of a problem getting X going to begin with, and once I installed the screensavers, utilities and games that the book was talking about, they automatically appeared on my taskbar. But configuring X exactly the way you want it is no small task. You have to copy a bunch of files in order to customize things for just yourself, as opposed to changing the way it works for everyone. You have to have in-depth knowledge of how X works and which files it's going to look for. I messed around with my window manager config files as described in my book so that fvwm2 doesn't look so much like Windows 95, but I'm only scratching the surface. Aware of my relative ignorance, I went out last night and spent $100 on books on X and the bash shell.
One of the first thing I'll do is make windows gain focus on clicking them. I don't know why this isn't the case right now, but it's very annoying. It's amazing how used to one windowing system you can get.
More Free Stuff
I want to push Linux by using it as a rendering workstation (yes, on my laptop!!). I'm going to install Pov-Ray and GIMP and see how it handles running several rendering tasks concurrently. Probably won't have a problem. I used to do this sort of thing with a couple of DOS prompts in Win95.
Kernel Recompilation
This is something I wasn't so lucky with. Once you start reading how to do it, you realize that it's almost fully automated and all you have to do is answer a bunch of Yes/No/Maybe questions. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the x version to work because of some missing header files. The text-based version worked until it got to the sound driver section, where it also broke. So now I'm stuck, which is a shame, because I wanted to compile in my sound drivers and the Advanced Power Management stuff so I could at least stand a chance of replacing Win95 completely. Now I'm about to test the technical support options. I guess I just have to ask questions in the right newsgroups.
Sunday, August 30th, 1998
Met this weekend with a great deal more success, both in setting up X-Windows and in recompiling the kernel. Thank God for the HOWTO documents included with the RedHat 4.x distribution.
One of the things that annoyed me since the beginning with running X was that it always dithered true-color images, even when I used startx -bpp 24, the command that starts up X using 24 bits per pixel. The FIRST thing you should do when you're trying to configure X is use the following debug command:
X > ~/x.out 2>&1
This dumps the screenloads of data, that X prints out when it starts, to the "x.out" file in your home directory, so you can open it in an editor and see what's going on. The SECOND thing you should know is that you should make changes to the configuration file as root, but you should run the altered version of X as a normal user. The most productive way I found of doing things was to log in as root on one virtual terminal, and have XF86Config open all the time. I'd make changes to the file, write it out (without exiting vi) and then switch to another terminal where I'd log in as myself, and execute X as shown above to test the changes. Note - I think you have to get out of X before switching virtual terminals using Alt-F2.
Before I started doing this, I noticed that running X as root seemed to be reading defaults or some other configuration file from somewhere. E.g., one of the error messages I saw in my x.out file was that a font directory I specified was invalid, but when I commented out that part of XF86Config, and started X as root, the error message remained. When I started it as myself, an ordinary user, the message disappeared. So edit XF86Config as root, execute as user.
Note - when you run X as above, just press ctrl-alt-backspace to exit immediately. You can't really use X when you start it like that, it's just a useful debug thing.
So one of the first things I realized when looking at x.out was that X was never going in to 24 bpp mode. Ever. That's why all the dithering was taking place. This is where some hard-core XF86Config'urating came in.
XF86Setup vs. xf86config
I think that the text-based tool xf86config produces more useful defaults in the XF86Config file it generates, especially in the monitor timings part. I ran the X windows tool (after installing the 16-color X libraries it uses) and told it about my chipset, and then cut and pasted the lines into the file produced by the other tool.
I know you're not supposed to do this, but I'm posting my XF86Config file for anyone who wants to try it on their Toshiba Satellite Pro 220 CDS. You'll find it here.
Two annoying things I changed in the config file. First, I removed the extra Virtual Desktop space. That scrolling around on the screen thing just annoys me. The 220 has an 800x600 display, so that's the biggest Virtual Space I use. Next, I made the 800x600 mode first in the list, so that you don't have to switch modes when you start up. Doing this is particularly annoying because you have to use the + key on the numeric keypad, and you have to switch that keypad on manually every time and then remember to switch it off, or you'll start ty-5ng n40bers when y64 rea33y want t6 be ty-5ng w6rds.
Finally, I added the "no-stretch" option so that the cursor works properly in the 640x480 mode. This makes the screen sit rather uncomfortably in the upper left hand corner of the display, but it looks much nicer than the stretched version and fixes a problem with the mouse hot-spot.
I also made 24 bpp the default color mode. No more dithering!!
Monitors
One of the most confusing things I found with XF86Config is monitor timing. Eventually it dawned on me that the 220 doesn't have a monitor unless you actually plug one into the back. Sure enough, the documentation explains that the Chips 65554 chipset has internal timings for the LCD display panel. All that monitor guff is useless, as far as I can tell, unless you plug in an external monitor.
Once I got 16 and 24 bpp modes working, I was getting some nasty visual jittering whenever I moved a window. Don't panic. All you have to do is switch the display output (using Fn-F5). It doesn't seem to matter whether you're using Display only or Display plus Monitor (didn't have a monitor to check Monitor Only) - you just need to cycle through the options once and the jittering goes away. This also seems to brighten the screen a lot. Doesn't seem necessary in 8 bpp mode.
Povray
I read the Povray release notes and found that I installed it wrong. I'm not at all used to the installation procedures on UNIX, so I just unzipped it all in one place. The documentation described how it should be done in a way that makes much more sense. Now anyone logging onto my machine can use it just as easily. It rocks. In fact, I'm rendering scenes as I write this.
Boot-Up to X
It's quite easy to have your laptop start up in X so you never see command-line Linux, but I'm not sure I'm confident enough with my X-Windows configuration to do that yet. You can test how it looks with init 5.
Kernel Recompilation
The problem I was having with kernel recompilation was SO stupid. I hadn't installed the libc package, so gcc didn't even have stdio.h. Once I discovered my mistake I ran make xconfig and tried to get Sound, PCMCIA, Iomega ZIP Drive, and Advanced Power management (APM) installed.
Unfortunately, this is the episode that ends with "to be continued...". My PCMCIA card is a Xircom Modem/Ethernet card that will take some fighting with, and the Satellite 220 sound system is "non-standard". I got it to make some sounds, though not the ones I was expecting, and I can't play audio CDs. I'll probably hunt around on the other Toshiba Laptop Linux pages to see how other people did the sound thing. As for APM, I haven't tested much there (though I think the machine turns off after a halt command now, which is new) and I didn't try anything with the Zip Drive yet. All this came with the RedHat distribution, so I assume it's pretty stable. No mention of the Connectix QuickCam.
Another super-useful debugging tool that lets you see the messages Linux prints out when it starts up, is "dmesg | more". You can see what it's doing as it interrogates your hardware, unlike MicroSlop "Operating Systems". One interesting thing Linux does is work out how many Million Instructions Per Second (MIPs) your processor can handle. If you reboot your 220 in low-power mode, this is around 26, and over 52 in high-power mode. I love Linux.
Thursday, January 7th, 1999
The saga continues...
Since finishing the previous entries, I've successfully installed Pov-Ray, Quake, Netscape Navigator, and TCP/IP networking on my Linux Toshiba 220. It took me a while to get my Xircom Ethernet / Modem combo PCMCIA card working, but it worked eventually, and it seems pretty solid. I recently switched it for another ethernet-only card and the PCMCIA package correctly identified it without a problem.
I made some attempts at configuring the Window Manager to display what I wanted it to, such as valid hosts and all the applications I use most, but it's not as easy as Windoze 95 / NT. Ah well, such is the price of flexibility. To be honest, I stopped Using Linux for much, so I'll stick to the command line until I can find some good documentation on how to customize your user environment.
If you've visited the rest of my pages, you'll probably see that the bulk of my time with Linux went into installing and configuring it on another machine, namely the IBM Thinkpad 350C, so that I can develop Javica, my Java application for Sony Mavica, on both Windoze and MacOS platforms concurrently. Given that I was developing Javica for Win32 and MacOS, I didn't spend much time in Linux on the 220, so there isn't much more to speak of. The next steps will be to configure my desktop so I'm happy with it, but that's just fritterware, and I have plenty to do before then.
Next up will be to install the JDK 1.1 for Linux, so I can develop Javica for all three platforms. I won't be able to do that concurrently without buying a another machine, but I'm not ruling that out just yet. Maybe one of those Sony Vaio jobs with the DV stuff built in (drool, slaver, slobber, drool).
I haven't got sound working yet, but I didn't try very hard. All I need it for is Quake. I did install some greatToshiba-specific utilities, that resemble those provided by Toshiba for Windows 95 but I believe my fan is broken. I also read somewhere that it's possible to boot RedHat's installer program right from the CD-Rom drive, so I probably didn't have to put myself through all that malarkey I talked about above.
As you can read here, I use my Thinkpad 350C as my gateway to the internet (configured as a router, using ip-forwarding) so I had no need to install a modem or ppp on the Toshiba. I'm sure both would be as easy as it was on the Thinkpad. I might try the QuickCam drivers soon, too, now that moving the Zip Drive to the 350 has freed up my Parallel port. Also, if I DO get another box to install Windows 95 on, I'll probably make the Toshiba a Linux-Only machine, and use xdm to boot right into the X-Windows login prompt. Once I've gotten things to that point, It's time to start thinking seriously about regular backups, to protect all the work required to get things the way you want them.
Mike
Thursday, August 16th, 2001
Infinity and beyond.
I still use my 220 a great deal. Since the days of RedHat 4.2, the installer has come a long way, as has overall hardware compatibility. On top of that, even though my 220 still won't boot from CD, I bought the add-on floppy drive attachment, so installation, armed with both a floppy boot disk and the CD set is now trivial. I'm up to RedHat 7.1 now and it works like a charm with no problems to speak of, other than a lack of disk space. I still dual-boot, but my windoze partition has been squeezed (thanks, in part, to GNOME) down to about 400Mb.
In retrospect, I learned a great deal about Linux from hacking away at version 4.2, but I'm grateful that things are now a lot easier.