Linux on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 430 CDT

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Some useful links: Some useful pages and progs I pulled off of a section of toshiba.com:
links Xconfig Xconfig hack ethernet sound email

X Config

The basics are monitor = lcd 800x600; no clockchip; video card = Chips & Technologies ct65550; vram = 2meg; you must install the XF86_SVGA server for this to work. Having the XF86_VGA16 also, as a backup server, wouldn't hurt.

here's an excerpt from the XF86Config of the 430CDT which was the subject of the French page above (excuse the random French leftovers from the Babelfish). 
# HorizSync is in kHz unless units are specified. 
# HorizSync may Be has comma separated list of discrete been worth, 
# but has comma separated list of arrange of been worth 
# NOTES:  BEEN WORTH THE HERE ARE EXAMPLES ONLY.  REFER TO YOUR 
# MONITOR' S TO USE CORRECT MANUAL FOR THE NUMBERS.  
HorizSync 31.5 - 43 
# Note:  BEEN WORTH THE HERE ARE EXAMPLES ONLY.  REFER TO YOUR 
# MONITOR' S TO USE CORRECT MANUAL FOR THE NUMBERS.  
VertRefresh 40-76
heh. if i had the freakin manual, and it had the freakin refresh rates, would I be writing this page?!?! And here's some more random bitz of the XF86Config 
# VideoRam 2048 
# The Colour SVGA server Section "
Screen " Driver " svga " 
# Uses Device " Generic VGA " for Standard
VGA 320x200x256 
# Device " Generic VGA " Device " gre " Monitor " Ge "
DefaultColorDepth 16
wow, as it turns out, my display is better than the 430CDS. 
INTERNAL SUPPORT
        430CDS
        Full Screen: 800x600x 64K/64K colors
	Smaller Image: 640x480x64K/64K colors
	Virtual Display Mode: 1024x768x64K/64K colors
	Virtual Display Mode: 1280 x 1024 x 256/222K colors

	430CDT
	Full Screen: 800x600x16.7M/16.7M colors
	Smaller Image: 640x480x16.7M/16.7M  colors
	Virtual Display Mode: 1024x768x64K/64K colors
	Virtual Display Mode: 1280 x 1024 x 256/256K colors
And here is the part that got my display to run first as 640x480, then as 800x600 with some scary Hsync interference, and finally working correctly.
     #HorizSync 31.5-37.9 (only bought me 640x480)
     #HorizSync 31.5-48.5 (800x600, but I thought I'd blow my screen. I pulled this setting from the Geocities page above.)
     HorizSync 31.5-43 (FinallY! 800x600, i just dropped the top limit, which must have forced it to a proper modeline. Guess I shoulda tried this in the first place, eh? I mean, I did quote this setting no more than 3 paragraphs ago. :P )
Since this machine is a bit slow, I wasn't able to run Gnome and Enlightenment on it without pegging the cpu. So I hacked up up a couple of config files to get it running FVWM1. Big improvement. Pretty soon, I'll post the changes I had to make.

... time marches on ...

Ok, thanks to Don Hargrove's request I'm finally posting the Xconfig files. Please remember that I did quite a bit of experimentation with this, so I don't know how many of these files you actually need to muck with. My guess is 1 or 2. So, with no further ado, I give you ... the players:

.Xclients.fvwmrc .xinitrc .Xdefaults.wm_style
Most of them are copies from system directories. I traced the X startup scripts, and the output of startx to find out why I was getting Gnome. I got the .xinitrc and .Xclients from /etc/X11/xinit. The .xinitrc didn't change, so you probably don't need that. But the .Xclients is where I finally find the cleanest way to get fvwm to start. These two lines near the top: 
# turn on fvwm (turn off gnome)
PREFERRED=fvwm
make all the difference.

The .fvwmrc has alot of my own garbage in it. Some of it's useful, some not. I changed the alt-arrow bindings so that I could use them in Netscape. You'll probably want to take a look at the Function "InitFunction" section to arrange your starting desktop. Xdefaults is just for reference, or just in case you need it. And .wm_style is probably the same way, I removed it on my machine and didn't notice any change. It could be leftover from some Gnome settings I adjusted.

Your Mileage may vary, but fvwm works much better for me on this machine than Gnome did. If these settings don't work for you, or you have other ideas, or whatever; then go to the end of this page and email me.

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Ethernet/Modem

With the computer came a "US Robotics Megahertz(tm) Ethernet/33.6 XJACK Modem PC Card Network Interface Card". I found some information on this card at 3com's support site. But the individual pages were not easy to track down, so I'll list them here. Gawd! I'm such a fool. I ran the /bin/linuxconf tool from a terminal within X, and It gave me a pretty interface for all my ethernet needs. Since the card was already recognized (as proven by the contents of /var/run/stab) I only needed to config the interface. Choose "Basic Host Information" from the menus on the left under Config:Networking:Client_tasks. The driver choices didn't include one for the smc91c92_cs (the entry in stab, and output of lsmod). However, it did have a smc9194. I don't have a clue what either one of those means, but the smc9194 worked for my card. So, the settings for Adapter 1 in the cute little gui are: To get those last two values, I should have been able to run cardinfo, but that binary wasn't on my system. The manpage, however, was. It gave /sbin/cardctl as a reference. From reading the man pages, it appeared that cardinfo was a gui version of cardctl, more or less.

So now all is good with DHCP networking. I'm looking for a way to automatically change the networking from DHCP to a static IP setup, so I can freely move the machine from home to work. It appears that cardctl may be able to do this by use of a scheme file, but there's very little in the way of hints about the format and functionality of that file. I'm checking the PCMCIA Howto for more info on scheme-swapping.

...time marches on...

It appears that scheme-swapping is unnecessary. Under RedHat 6.0 (and I'm not sure which others) all you need is a simple script which

  1. brings down networking, /etc/rc.d/init.d/network stop; ifconfig eth0 down
  2. changes the config files,
  3. then brings networking back up, /etc/rc.d/init.d/network start
Something like the following should work. I haven't tried it with steps 1 and 3 yet. For step 2, you create 3 sets of config files: one for home, one for work, and the current one. The current one is a duplicate of one of the other two sets. To change the settings, you run a script which copies one of the templates over the current set. The following script will change my settings to my home network configuration. 
#!/bin/bash
cp -f /etc/hosts-home /etc/hosts
cp -f /etc/resolv-home /etc/resolv.conf
cp -f /etc/sysconfig/network-home /etc/sysconfig/network
cp -f /etc/pcmcia/network.opts-home /etc/pcmcia/network.opts
cp -f /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0-home /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
To get this to actually make a difference in RedHat 5.2, all you had to do was take down networking; take down the interface; swap the settings with the script; and bring up the interface and networking. However, that doesn't seem to work in RedHat 6.0. What does work in 6.0 is to eject the card, then re-insert it. I assume that this will also work in 5.2, but I never installed RedHat 5.2 on this laptop. 5.2 findings were from a different laptop.
links Xconfig Xconfig hack ethernet sound email

Sound

as for sound. This is about all you get from The Detailed Specs: 
Chipsets
        ESS Technologies ESS688 & Yamaha OPL3 (YMF262)

Sound formats supports
	        SoundBlaster Pro V3.01, .WAV, MIDI, 
		Zoomed video port audio (stereo), 
		CardBus audio (monaural), CD-ROM audio
The Linux Sound HOWTO 3 supported hardware section has this to say:
The following sound cards are supported by the Linux kernel sound driver:
Even though most sound cards are claimed to be "SoundBlaster compatible", very few currently sold cards are compatible enough to work with the Linux SoundBlaster driver. These cards usually work better using the MSS/WSS or MAD16 driver. Only real SoundBlaster cards made by Creative Labs, which use Creative's custom chips (e.g. SoundBlaster16 Vibra), MV Jazz16 and ESS688/1688 based cards generally work with the SoundBlaster driver.
run /usr/sbin/sndconfig as root. ESS688 is one of the choices. Take that, and use the values from below when it asks you. Or, if you're daring, you can just put this stuff in your /etc/conf.modules. 
---- from someone else's conf.modules ---
alias sound sb
options sb io=0x220 irq=10 dma=1
alias midi opl3
options opl3 io=0x388
--
---- from my conf.modules after running sndconfig ---
alias sound sb
pre-install sound insmod sound dmabuf=1
alias midi opl3
options opl3 io=0x388
options sb io=0x220 irq=10 dma=1
--
Works loverly. Jason Spence (who's conf.modules is quoted) says that I should do something like modprobe type=12. This was needed with this card in 2.0 kernels or earlier because they had some "magic register" which was different from the SoundBlaster. Apparently, if you didn't tell the driver about that register, it failed. We found out that in 2.0 kernels you had to use this line, in 2.2 you didn't.

He also says I might not be getting 16 bit sound, but I'll worry about that later.

infra-red

No hurry on this. At least not till I get a cool legobot I wanna talk to. :)

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If you have anything to add, or some questions I might be able to answer, remove DON'TSPAM from the address below and mail them to me.
DON'TSPAMjason@inbed.org

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