|
|
All the Satellite 1625 CDT features seem to work with Linux. Briefly, these features include:
On the whole, I like my 1625. It travels well and I like the array of features. Apart from the battery life (which I'll discussed in a second), I've found it to be a pretty reliable unit.
However, the battery life does seem to be a problem. In either Windows or Linux, the NiMH battery has never lasted the full 2 1/2 hours listed in the manual; when fully drained and recharged, the battery sometimes lasts an hour. NiMH batteries are prone to memory errors. Also, they can be damaged by being over-charged. Therefore, whenever possible, I run the laptop from AC power without the battery installed. Obviously, the 1625 is not the best unit to use on a plane.
Finally, I guess some of the Satellite 16xx systems tend to get a little hot. Toshiba released a BIOS update which, among other things, was intended to help correct a potential overheating problem with 1605 and 1625 systems.
I installed both Debian and Red Hat on my 1625. Both distributions worked fine. However, for this review, I'll focus on Red Hat 7.3 because I expect that's what most people plan to run. Anyway, most Debian users probably won't have too many problems translating my configuration suggestings into their distribution.
First off, I replaced the puny 4.5GB disk which came with the system with a 20GB IBM TravelStar. I'm kind of a pack rat; my home directory tends to get pretty big. Also, I typically install quite a bit of software: games, compilers, kde, gnome, office suites, kernel source... Therefore, I found the default drive to be a bit cramped.
Next, I don't have a Microsoft Windows partition. After replacing the factory drive, I never bothered to restore Windows. So, if you are planning to dual-boot, you will certainly not want to adopt my partitioning strategy.
Anyway, whether you keep or replace either the factory drive or Windows, you want to reserve a couple of hundred megabytes at the end of the drive for a hibernate partition. Briefly, hibernation (suspend-to-disk) is a BIOS service which copies your running state (RAM, CPU, etc) to a small partition or file somewhere on your hard disk. Theoretically, this allows you to save your working state on a laptop without power for an indefinite amount of time.
There is some debate on exactly how much space you should reserve for hibernation; I reserved a little over 200MB. However, someone built a clever utility which takes away all of the guesswork by creating and initializing a reasonable partition for you. Check out lphdisk for both the utility and a good overview the hibernation issue.
Without further ado, here's my partition table. The hibernation partition occupies the last 25 cylinders of the disk; its tag is 'a0' (IBM Thinkpad hibernation). Also, I have a 100MB boot partition, an 8GB root, a 1GB var, a 9GB home and a 500MB swap partition. Except for swap and hibernation, all filesystems are ext3.
The default Red Hat kernel works fine. However, I'm using kernel 2.4.19-rc1.
I like static, monolithic kernels which are optimized for the specific machine hardware. Certainly, I do use modules. However, I prefer to reserve modules for stuff I use only occasionally (e.g. DOS filesystems, NFS, Samba, USB scanners, etc.).
Therefore, I prefer to learn the hardware of a machine and compile a kernel specific to the machine's hardware. In the case of the Satellite 1625 CDT, I used this configuration file. Briefly, the custom kernel...
The laptop has an ATI 3D Rage LT Pro AGP (mach64) chip on-board with 4 MB dedicated video memory. Obviously, the video is not as fast as some modern laptops using the Rage128 or Radeon chipsets. Nevertheless, the mach64 is an old, well-understood favorite so you'll most likely have few if any problems configuring X. And, having 4MB dedicated memory certainly helps.
I used Red Hat's "Anaconda" to configure X. The XF86Config-4 file is here.
I did manually modify the configuration to accept an USB optical wheel mouse in addition to the pointing device built into the 1625. If you would like to do the same, first make sure you have configured USB mouse support for your system; e.g. if you are using the stock RedHat kernel, try running the setup utility and select the Mouse configuration menu. Next, look at the following entries in my XF86Config-4:
Note: Tuning the hard disk controller requires some understanding of hdparm. However, a bad hdparm configuration could quite possibly severly damage your filesystems. Therefore, please test *any* hdparm configurations on a read-only system before implementing them for normal use. Please do not simply copy my configuration without first testing it on your system.
To boot my system read-only, I have the following entry in grub.conf:
title Read-only Mode (2.4.19-rc1) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.19-rc1-custom01 -s ro root=/dev/hda5 init=/bin/bashAfter booting read-only, mount the proc filesystem like so...
mount -t proc /proc /procNow, test away :-)
That said, the Satellite 1625 motherboard is based on an ALI chipset (specifically, if you are interested, it has a 1541 host bridge, a 1533 PCI to ISA bridge and a M5229 IDE controller). This section focuses on the IDE configuration of the chipset.
As far as I can tell, DMA/UDMA seems to be working. And, most important, IDE performance seems to be good. However, on my system, suspend-to-disk seems to require the -X66 hdparm parameter.
Specifically, along with my custom kernel, this hdparm configuration works for me (again, please test the configuration on a read-only boot):
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -m16 -X66 -u1 /dev/hdaOnce you have tested your configuration, you can implement it for each boot by modifying /etc/sysconfig/harddisks (e.g. the the USE_DMA, MULTIPLE_IO and EXTRA_PARAMS variables). This is my configuration.
To ensure the configuration sticks, look at /proc/ide/ali. It should look something like this.
The laptop has a Crystal CS4281 chip for on-board sound. For the Red Hat default kernel, you can easily configure sound by using the 'setup' utility. In fact, you should probably run setup with the Red Hat default kernel before you build a custom kernel.
As mentioned in the 'Kernel' section above, I'm using a custom kernel with APM support. Apart from that, I'm using Red Hat's default apmd configuration. Here's my /etc/sysconfig/apmd. Also, here's my /etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/apmscript.
The Satellite 1625 CDT has an on-board Conexant HSF 'winmodem'. The good news: it's pretty easy to get this modem working with Linux, even with custom kernels. The bad news: at the time of this writing, I have only found closed-source solutions.
Anyway, you can get the drivers at the following sites:
I used the HSFp_linux.tar.gz archive at the Conexant site. If you follow the instructions provided in the archive, all should go well.
Best of Luck!
Jon Hart - July 8, 2002
jonhart_99@yahoo.com
 |