Installing Gentoo on Toshiba M45

borfig · Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 6:55 pm Post subject:

Hello fellow Toshiba users!
I own a Toshiba M30 and my hd is a Toshiba one...
I found out that grub does not like my hd at all, while lilo works very slowly on it...
any ideas???
borfig.
PS. My acpi works out-of-the-box in the livecd and final installation...

zpet731 · Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2005 4:16 am Post subject:

I believe that from my experience, reading through the forums M30 doesn't show the odd behavior with the ACPI as the m40/m45 does. Have you compiled the correct modules for your ide/sata drive. You need to post your lspci and kernel config in order to really tell what
the problem is. Relative parts of dmesg would be quite useful too.

My plan now is to see how the 2005.1 live cd picks up the m40/m45. Maybe that will give me some more answers. I am reluctant on transferring the dvd drive on to SCSI. From what I read it shows more instability than improvement. I've read that the ICH6 chipset is one of the rear ones that are supported though.
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" Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs."
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mnemo · n00b Joined: 24 Jul 2003 Posts: 13

horton30 · n00b Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 62 Location: Penn State!

I just purchased a Satellite M45. I cannot get anything working with the live cd. I have tried doing everything in these posts to try and get a network connection but fail. It has the Marvell Yukon 88E8036 Ethernet control with the Intel 2200BG wireless connection. I just downloaded the 2005.1 live cd but I cannot get a network connection. ifconfig always just returns 'lo'. I tried to modprobe skge and sk98lin but they wont get the ethernet controller to show up either. I also have tried to boot with gentoo noacpi and then re-load the ipw2200 modules but it returns this error.

ipw2200 failed to send TX_POWER command
ipw2200 failed to send TX_POWER command
ipw2200 failed to send TX_POWER command
ipw2200 failed to send TX_POWER command
ipw2200 failed to send TX_POWER command
Unable to initailize
failed to register device after 5 tries
failed w/ error -5

and so then ifconfig still doesn't work. I really need to get this working so I would greatly appreciate any help. thanks.

jonnycodesalot · n00b Joined: 28 Aug 2005 Posts: 2

Regarding "ipw2200 failed to send TX_POWER command " - I found a way to get around this in 2005.1

It looks like the wireless adapter actually requires ACPI, so you need to use the kernel boot parameter "acpi=noirq" instead of just "noacpi". Doing this, after boot you have to unload and reload the module ("modprobe -r ipw2200" following by "modprobe ipw2200" - this is mentioned in one of the links above). After it reloads, wait about 15 seconds and a message prints complaining that the firmware encountered an error and is restarting. Once that happens, you can run dhcpcd and be on your way - at least, it worked for me

Hope this helps.

jonnycodesalot · n00b Joined: 28 Aug 2005 Posts: 2

For some reason in 2005.1 (and I assume 2005.0) the EIDE harddrive in my M45 is being shown as "sda0" instead of "hda0" - has anyone else experienced this? I don't know if it's related, but I boot my kernel with "root=/dev/sda3" and it complains on boot that it cannot mount the root filesystem. Any help?

zpet731 · Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 11:56 am Post subject:

Your hard drive should be recognized as a SATA drive. That is if you have a standard Linux installation your root should be sda3. If you are talking about grub then your hard drive should be hd0,0 indicating the first hard drive (in our case only one) and the first partition. I'm not sure how your hard drive is seen as sda0 or hda0. It should be sda1, sda2, sda3 for boot, swap and root respectively. If it can't seem to mount your root partition then I think you should check your fstab.
_________________
" Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs."
Nikola Tesla

horton30 · n00b Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 62 Location: Penn State!

Ok I got the wireless thing working. When I was putting settings in the kernel I was pretty clueless on what I need for the wireless & wired ethernet so I doubt they will work. I also didn't know what to include for other things w/ a laptop since this is the first time I've installed Gentoo (or any linux distro) on a laptop. Then I emerged grub and typed grub. Now, my partition scheme looks like this:

/dev/sda1 --> Windows NTFS
/dev/sda2 --> Boot partition I created while installing w/ the live cd
/dev/sda3 --> Linux swap
/dev/sda4 --> Linux /

Now this is the first time I am installing windows and linux on the same machine so I hope that will work. Whenever I am in the grub setup and I type root ( then use tab completion it defaults to root (hd0, . Now shouldn't this be sd0, 0?
I dont know what I need to put for that. I need to know what to use to setup grub. Thanks.

horton30 · n00b Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 62 Location: Penn State!

Ok I was able to get the boot loader working successfully.

Here are some new problems. Of course since i've reboot neither the ethernet controller nor the wireless works, which doesn't surprise me a bit. A weird problem is that ifconfig is not found. iwconfig is, but ifconfig isn't. I am not sure why this is. It isn't in /sbin/ifconfig. Anyone have any leadway on that? Also what do you suggest I do now to get the wireless or ethernet controller working?.

Another note: Whenever it is booting up it gives an error when it tries to start lo or whatever. Thanks.

zpet731 · Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 3:53 pm Post subject:

Have you emerged net-tools?

Also to make sure that your networking works acpi needs to be off. The second thing to note is that your wired and wireless cannot have the same gateway.Therefore if you are trying to connect to a singular network with a particular gateway, which is typical for a home setup, then you need to make sure that you use either the wired or the wireless. Therefore stop the service of the eth_ device you are not using.
_________________
" Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs."
Nikola Tesla

evader · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 3:51 am Post subject:

I have an M40, with the 88e8036. My wireless works fine with acpi=noirq.

I want to install Gentoo via the wired ethernet though.

The driver on the 2005.1 universal live cd doesn't seem to work.

Any ideas please? Should I install from within Knoppix or something???
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zpet731 · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 7:19 am Post subject:

I'm not sure if the 2005.1 has the patch for the sk98lin driver but I doubt it. Therefore your best option with the least hassle is to use the wireless for the installation. Then once you install the distro you can patch the kernel. Follow http://www.tmeyer.de/toshiba_a80_154.html and go to step 4 where it mentions the kernel patch. Follow the instructions and you'll be on your way.
_________________
" Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs."
Nikola Tesla

evader · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 12:35 am Post subject:

Only problem with that, is that the wireless networks I have access too are mostly wpa.

Any ideas for wpa access from the livecd? Does wpa_supplicant work? How?

Thanks for the response.
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evader · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 12:37 am Post subject:

One other thing, I boot using the noirq option as that seems to fix the 2915abg without breaking other stuff.

But, no matter what kernel boot option i've tried, how do I get hdparm to work

It's a sata device (sda)... I've tried the hdparm settings as per the install guide, but it always fails with an ioctl error.

Help?
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kimchi_sg · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:15 am Post subject:

evader · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 2:37 am Post subject:

Thanks!

Is there tools to optimise SATA drives or is it unnecessary?
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kimchi_sg · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:06 am Post subject:

evader · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 5:13 am Post subject:

Thanks again.
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faugusztin · n00b Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 47

sandersonshea · n00b Joined: 22 Sep 2005 Posts: 9

I own a Toshiba M40 and after quite alot of searching it seems that the bios functions are simular to the Tecra S1. I am using a util for the tecra that allows you to change the lcd brightness found at http://tz.exit0.net/tecras1.html

nessy · n00b Joined: 14 Nov 2002 Posts: 26

Howdy folks - bringing this one up from the dead!
I'm having some serious issues here getting any decent resolution on X, and glx gears won't go over 800fps.

I'm hopeful someone who has this working would be kind enough to post their xorg.conf for me to compare against.

Best Regards.
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EvenOdd · n00b Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 3

nessy: I am using gentoo-sources-2.6.15-gentoo-r1 and xorg-x11-7.0 with dri drivers. I get about 843 fps with glxgears. It's good enough for me (I just need decent video playback). Should it be higher?

zpet731 · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 11:42 am Post subject:

I believe this has been mentioned at the beginning of this post, but to say it again, you should be able to achieve a higher frame rate then that.
My current output from glxgears gives me:

ewaller · Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 4:34 am Post subject:

It has been a long while since I have posted here. This machine (M45-S265) is just about a year old and I still love it.

This past weekend I updated my kernel to 2.6.16-gentoo-r3 and to the modular Xorg system.

I am nothing short of delighted.

Direct rendering works perfectly.
The Marvell Ethernet chipset works with the sky2 driver.
Wireless networking works without a hitch.
The modem works using slmodem.
The DVD drive works with DMA as a nativa SATA drive.
CPU throttling works well
glxgears reports > 1100 fps without causing any hanging up any interrupts.
1280x800 works "out of the box"
USB memory devices work perfectly.
No problems with ALSA.
LAPIC is enabled at boot

All of this without ANY non-portage drivers, no patches, no obsure command line parameters at boot. Just (almost) pure goodness.

The only hitch is that the S1BL program I had been using to control my backlight brightness causes (among other problems) a kenel mode division by zero followed by a kernel panic. Oh well, it was a highly experimental program to begin with.

In any event, I recommend this configuration. Try it at your own risk...
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Wyatt · Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 11:35 am Post subject:

Well I've been working on getting Gentoo working on one of these specimens and, frankly comrades, I'm getting a headache. So if I can pick your collective brain for ideas/advice...

First off, I'm getting "Clocksource tsc unstable" at boot, which doesn't seem especially harmful, but also is rather annoying a hang, considering it doesn't actually happen with the live CD at boot (2007.0). Unfortunately, most of the imformation I'm finding on this is buried in the lkml and is inconclusive at best

Second, the hard drive is being detected as a PATA device (rather than SATA) and trying to disable generic IDE support in the kernel seems to have not helped one whit. In fact, I had to go back with the livecd and reenable it or it would boot-panic. What modules should be enabled to make the chipset play nice?

Ethernet....well I guess that works now. sky2, at least, is nice and useful.

Thanks,
Wyatt