The Toshiba 200CDS and Linux

Laptops Index

Aeris - My Toshiba 200CDS - Running X11, BitchX, Licq, and Netscape 4.5

HW Information
EquipmentType
ComputerToshiba 200CDS
CPUIntel P5-S (Pentium, with SMM), 100MHz
RAM8MB onboard + 32M upgrade/Expansion, 40MB total
HD4.3GB Internal IBM 9.5mm, upgraded from IBM 777MB
CDSelect Bay Internal XM-1402B 6x
FDSelect Bay standard 3.5" 1.44MB
Display11.3" VGA Compatible LCD, Color DSTN
SoundESS688, SB compatible
Pointing device2 button Accupoint(PS/2 compatible)
PCMCIA Cards(Linux)Global Village 56K, Xircom Creditcard Ethernet 10/100, SanDisk 4M FlashATA, Panasonic (Qlogic) SCSI adaptor
Battery/Life12V 2.6A-Hr, Runs around 2:30 in "Economy" mode with Backlight power on 100% Duty(Semi-Bright), HD turned on and off

I'm currently running a stripped down Linux/RedHat5.1, which is based off of my desktop machine's installation.

To install, I basically booted into linux with a boot disk, made the file system, copied the boot disk onto the hard drive, and copied enough to get PCMCIA working, and the rest was through the network... don't try this at home!
I installed onto a blank disk, first using a boot floppy - I manually installed a basic installation, got pcmcia working, and NFS copied the rest. I deleted LOTS of stuff including RPM so I could save plenty of disk space - even though I didn't need to - I have plenty of free space on my harddrive - over 3GB with everything installed (including Windows...)

To install it normally, the new linux CDs includes a virtual ramdisk image and you can just format the HD to DOS with CDROM drivers, and run the installation program from the CDROM. No floppies required!

To acheive X11, I'm running the SVGA server and it supports the chip directly. This way I got a nice 800x600, 16 bits per plane. Netscape runs nicely under this mode. XFree86 3.3.3.1! (Should work in 3.3.6) Key Points:
SpecValue
Pointer
ProtocolPS/2
Device/dev/psaux
Emulate3Buttons
200CDS LCD
Modeline "640x480"28.3 640 664 760 800 480 491 493 525
Modeline "800x600"28.322 800 808 848 936 600 600 604 628
Graphics Device
ChipsetCT65550
Optionlcd_center

PCMCIA

PCMCIA cardmgr 3.0.6 works fine without modifications. I have a FlashATA 4MB HD, 10/100baseT PCMCIA Ethernet, and 56K K56Flex/V90 PCMCIA modem. All are plug and play (except for the ethernet which wont autodetect 100Mbit...)
I'm using pcmcia-utils 3.1.33 and Linux-2.2.20 currently.

Sound

Sound was not difficult to get working. In the Toshiba HW Config/tsetup utility, make note of the IRQ/IO of the sound card. Then specify Sound Blaster 16 support in the kernel compile options and specify the IRQ and IO port. Recompile and it should work fine. MP3s are a little slow on this machine, but if there's nothing else running, 44.1KHz 16 bit is very nice.

I wouldn't recommend compiling kernels on this machine if you have another to do so. It has been a while since the hour-long kernel compiles (I haven't had kernel compile times so long in a while), but this machine will take a while to complete. I estimate around 1h20m for kernel and modules now (2.2 or 2.4 series kernel. Don't forget about recompiling pcmcia-utils too.
(My worst was a 386DX40/4M/40M and that took 6 hours to compile Linux 0.99.12. Changing that 40MB to a then "modern" 260MB sped up compile times to an hour, and increasing the RAM dropped it another 20 minutes. But nowadays kernels have grown from less than 1MB compressed to over 20MB bz2'd...)
I compile on my Queue or Midgar usually, and sometimes on my other laptop, Rinoa even; as they're all more than an order of magnitude faster :)

Installed stuff

I have the stripped down version of RH51:
includes GCC/EGCS++, X11, TheGIMP, Star Office 5.1, Netscape 4.5, a copy of the kernel source tree, LinuxICQ, Emacs+elisp files, NetPBM tools, xv, ... I don't have Gnome or KDE installed.

In Windows:
Windows98, Office97, MirabilisICQ, QVTNET, vIRC, Photowise, ...

Free space: Still over 2GB

Last updated 2002 May 17
As of 2002 May 21, I do not own this laptop anymore. Sold it to help fund Rinoa.
http://www.linux-laptop.net/