The Toshiba T4600C and Linux


Toshiba T4600C - Running X11 and Netscape 3.4
Note: this picture was contrast-enhanced using TheGIMP-it's hard to take a picture of the machine with a flash :(

Note: I've sold this machine so I can't work on it anymore...


HW Information
EquipmentType
ComputerToshiba T4600C
CPUIntel 486SL (Low power 486DX with SMM), 33MHz
RAM4MB onboard + 8M Expansion, 12MB total
HD800MB Internal
FDstandard 3.5" 1.44MB
Display9.5" VGA Compatible LCD, Color TFT
Pointing device2 button Ballpoint(Not Shown)-I'd rather use the external mouse, good thing they work with the same X11 settings =)
PCMCIA Cards(Linux)Megahertz 14.4K, EigerNet 10bT/2 Combo
Battery/Life9.6V 3A-Hr

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

To install, I basically had a special boot disk that I used to prepare the partition and then copy a basic version of linux onto it using Windows 95, and then installed it from the harddrive. That done, and everything came easier. I deleted LOTS of stuff including RPM so I could save plenty of disk space, so currently I have around 200MB free disk space even with Win95, Office97, Linux with GCC, XFree86, Netscape, and even one kernel tree (2.0.35) installed. I didn't mention that I had lots of other junk on the drive, too!

To acheive X11, I'm running the SVGA server and lied to it that I had a supported chip. This way I got a slow but very useable 640x480, 8 bit color. Netscape runs fine under this mode. Key Points:
SpecValue
Pointer
ProtocolPS/2
Device/dev/psaux
Emulate3Buttons
T4600C LCD
Modeline "640x480"28.3 640 664 760 800 480 491 493 525
Graphics Device
ChipsetWD90C24 # The computer really uses a 90C27!
OptionNoAccel # VERY IMPORTANT!!!
VideoRam512
Clocks25.2 28.3 42.33 12.6

I compiled a kernel initially for Caitsith on my desktop, but then made it compile one for itself... It took 45 minutes to compile the base kernel and another 21 minutes for the modules. Maybe I should have just made my desktop compile, it's on the order of 10x faster...

I have four PCMCIA cards for this machine, unfortunately only two of which work under Linux. I couldn't get my Eiger Labs SS1000 nor my IBM 3D sound card working under Linux, but the MHz 14.4 and the Eiger Labs Combo worked pretty easily. I think for the Ethernet I had to slightly modify the string in the pcmcia config file, apparently they changed the card to return "Eiger labs" and the software was expecting "Eiger Labs" (note the L in both strings!).