Linux on a Toshiba Satellite 2410

This article reports my experiences with the installation of Linux distribution SuSE 8.1 on a Toshiba Satellite 2410–404 notebook. All its main parts perform well. Please use the links below or just scroll down to find out about details.
Note: This report has not been updated since 2003 and is provided for reference purposes since it still receives traffic.

If you have questions or if you encounter different solutions to the arising problems, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Important

This page only contains hints. It was not at all created in a professional context. I will not be held accountable for any damages, loss of data or other negative consequences that you might encounter using information displayed on this page. You do so at your own risk.

ACPI

SuSE provides an ACPI interface, but all special funcions, e.g. to make the laptop sleep, do not perform well. During some operations the system was halted completely and when initiating a shutdown, the Laptop did not power off itself.

Maybe there are some configuration options which I have not tried yet, but as a solution I recommend using APM instead. See my section about APM.

For more information about the implementation of ACPI into Linux see:

ACPI project at Sourceforge
This is the main page of the project team.
http://acpi.sourceforge.net/

APM

As an alternative to ACPI its predecessor APM works fine with linux. To turn it on just append acpi=off to the kernel parameters of your boot manager, e.g. lilo.

I have not tested hibernation and the different sleep modes yet. But everything works fine so far: The laptop does not crash as it occurred for some ACPI configurations. And, finally, the software shutdown also performs well.

CD, DVD, CD-R, CD-RW (optical drive)

The use of CDs and DVDs is smooth. I have already copied a CD to a CD-R and no problems occured, but I have not tested its CD-RW capabilities yet. Watching DVDs, e.g. with MPlayer, is also trouble-free.

Firewire

A driver exists, but as I do not own devices to test this, I am not able to comment further.

Floppy

No problems at all. Installation and mounting (by KDE agents) are performed automatically.

Graphics

The text mode works fine and installation is done automatically. SaX and YaST detect the NVidia card by themselves.

For legal reasons only a non–3D driver is supplied with the SuSE distribution. I tried to install the drivers provided by NVIDIA using versions 2960, 3123 and 4191. The automatic installations succeeds, but the driver appears not to work. I have not encountered the options required to enable 3D using the original NVidia drivers properly yet, even though I tried lots of different configurations.

If you want to test it yourself, be aware of the installation instructions. Especially find out details about the command switch2xf86 -glx which is installed by the rpms.

Installation can be performed using YaST YOU or by installing the proper rpm files which can be found at http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.

Hence, if you do not need 3D acceleration, you will be fully satisfied by an excellent picture, as brightness and colour are fine and the angle from which the screen can be seen properly is wide.

Keyboard

Works ok, but you will have to do some extra work do to use the Fn - keys. Consider to examine the toshutils - pages: http://www.buzzard.org.uk/toshiba/.

You may encounter double-letters, but that does not happen very often and can be suppressed by various alternatives. For details see: http://www.thorstenhaas.de/toshiba2410/#KEYBOARD. However, be aware that the directory /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ does not exist within SuSE 8.1, in case you want to start one of the scripts automatically. Instead - to be consistent - you might want to edit the runlevel properties with the YaST runlevel editor to insert automatic execution of a corresponding script.

Modem (Soft-)

There is no official driver. You may find a Toshiba-made homepage on their Japanese server, where they state that for legal reasons they do not intend to help users.

Anyway, the company Smartlink provides a driver for their own products which coincidentally also fits this notebook’s modem. Installation is highly experimental. But so far I had no problems at all.

This company does not ship the driver any more, but - of course - there is a download possibility on the web: http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/packages/smartlink/ and http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/resources.html, while still the copyright statement from Smartlink applies: http://www.smlink.com/. Have a look the very detailed installation instructions (text-file) for Smartlink drivers.

The most recent driver is contained in the file slmdm-2.7.9.tar.gz. I highly recommend to convert it to an rpm for better harmony with the SuSE philosophy by

rpm -ta slmdm-2.7.9.tar.gz

as root! The files will (on SuSE 8.1) be stored in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i386. To install the packages type:

rpm -i /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i386/slmdm-2.7.9-0.i386.rpm
rpm -i /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i386/slmdm-amr-2.7.9-0.i386.rpm

Depending on your system, you might have to use modprobe to load the drivers:

modprobe slamrmo

A bit unusual is that the modem is installed as device /dev/ttySL0. In order to easily integrate it into a working system type in the following commands as root to make it your standard modem (/dev/modem):

chgrp dialout /dev/ttySL0
rm /dev/modem
ln -s /dev/ttySL0 /dev/modem

It has to be added that SuSEconfig automatically restores the old settings. Therefore the last three lines have to be executed after every run of SuSEconfig which is regularly called by YaST. I found a solution for this externally, which sounds promising, but I haven’t tried it myself yet: http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-laptop/2003-Sep/0075.html. Check it out!

Users of SuSE 9.0 might want to have a look at http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-laptop/2003-Nov/0488.html, which, however, is correspondence in German.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Thorsten Haas for his hints.

PCI

For those who are interested, here is what lspci -v prints:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev
04)
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
    Memory at e0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Capabilities: [e4] #09 [d104]
    Capabilities: [a0] AGP version 2.0

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 04
) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
    Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, fast devsel, latency 64
    Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=64
    Memory behind bridge: fd000000-fdffffff
    Prefetchable memory behind bridge: dbf00000-dfffffff

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 02) (prog-if
00 [UHCI])
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
    I/O ports at efe0 [size=32]

00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM USB (Hub #2) (rev 02) (prog-if
00 [UHCI])
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
    I/O ports at ef80 [size=32]

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BAM/CAM PCI Bridge (rev 42) (prog-if 00
[Normal decode])
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
    Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=05, sec-latency=64
    I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff
    Memory behind bridge: fce00000-fcefffff

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801CAM ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 02)
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801CAM IDE U100 (rev 02) (prog-if 8a 
[Master SecP PriP])
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
    I/O ports at 01f0
    I/O ports at 03f4
    I/O ports at 0170
    I/O ports at 0374
    I/O ports at cfa0 [size=16]
    Memory at 20000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1K]

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio 
(rev 02)
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
    I/O ports at ce00 [size=256]
    I/O ports at cdc0 [size=64]

00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Modem (rev 02) (prog-if 00
[Generic])
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
    I/O ports at ca00 [size=256]
    I/O ports at c980 [size=128]

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 420 Go]
(rev a3) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
    Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
    Memory at dc000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
    Memory at dbf80000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=512K]
    Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
    Capabilities: [44] AGP version 2.0

02:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000
Controller (PHY/Link) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
    Memory at fceff800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
    Memory at fcef8000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82801CAM (ICH3) PRO/100 VE (LOM)
Ethernet Controller (rev 42)
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems EtherExpress PRO/100 VE
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
    Memory at fcef7000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
    I/O ports at df40 [size=64]
    Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

02:0b.0 CardBus bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems ToPIC95 PCI to Cardbus
Bridge with ZV Support (rev 32)
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 168, IRQ 11
    Memory at fce00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
    Bus: primary=02, secondary=04, subordinate=04, sec-latency=0
    I/O window 0: 0000d000-0000d0ff
    I/O window 1: 0000d400-0000d4ff
    16-bit legacy interface ports at 0001

02:0b.1 CardBus bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems ToPIC95 PCI to Cardbus
Bridge with ZV Support (rev 32)
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 168, IRQ 11
    Memory at fce01000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
    Bus: primary=02, secondary=05, subordinate=05, sec-latency=0
    I/O window 0: 0000d800-0000d8ff
    I/O window 1: 0000dc00-0000dcff
    16-bit legacy interface ports at 0001

02:0d.0 System peripheral: Toshiba America Info Systems SD TypA Controller
(rev 03)
    Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems: Unknown device 0001
    Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 11
    Memory at fcef6e00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
    Capabilities: [80] Power Management version 2

Sound

Alsa works fine: YaST automatically finds a soundcard called: “Intel 82801CA-ICH3.” No additional options have to be filled in. The first time I used sound, I did not hear anything. So do not be as stupid as I was: Login as root and call the programme alsamixer to change the volume to whatever you want it to be. Within KDE you might want to start the taskbar programme “kmix” to change volume more comfortably.

The sound using the internal speakers is ok and much better than I expected it to be. If you use the headset output and plug external (active) speakers, you will be fully satisfied.

Just as a hint: Do not try to install the “82801CA/CAM AC’97 Audio” which is not another soundcard but your soft-modem.

Touchpad

All parts (left, middle, right button and scrolling wheel) work fine. If you use a compatible programme (e.g. KDE programmes), the scrolling function can be used.

When switching from a console to the X window system you should wait a second before using your touchpad, so that it can be reconfigured properly. Otherwise it might behave abnormally.