Friday, February 5, 2010

Suffing Linux on a Toshiba t135D

My adventures with installing Linux on a Toshiba Satellite T135D :

Specs :
VISION Premium Technology from AMD Featuring
• AMD Turion™ Neo X2 Dual-Core Mobile Processor L625
o 1.6GHz, 1MB L2 Cache, 1.6GT/s
• AMD M780G Chipset
• ATI Radeon™ HD 3200 Graphics with 256MB-1919MB dynamically
allocated shared graphics memory
Memory
• Configured with 4GB DDR2 800MHz (max 8GB)
• 2 main memory slots. Both slots may be occupied.

Storage Drive
• 320GB (5400 RPM) Serial ATA hard disk drive
• TOSHIBA Hard Drive Impact Sensor (3D sensor)

Display
• 13.3” diagonal widescreen TruBrite® LED backlit TFT LCD display at
1366 x 768 native resolution (HD)
o Native support for 720p content
o 16:9 aspect ratio

Sound
Intel HD Audio

Communications
• Webcam and microphone
• 10/100 Ethernet (Atheros mod ATL1E)
• Wi-Fi® Wireless networking (802.11b/g/n) (Realtech rtl8192se)

Linux Distro Gentoo kernel 2.6.32.7 AMD 64bit

What works good, what works ok and what doesn't work.

What works good:
  • X11 with the radeonhd driver with no 3d (did not try 3d)
  • Suspend / resume using s1 (to bios)
  • Wire ethernet Atheros module ATL1E worked without issues.
What works OK:
  • Mouse pad with Synaptics driver trying to get middle button working right is not fun . After a week it still does strange things from time to time.
  • Synaptics parm of AccelFactor should be set to something like 0.1 this helps alot.
What does not work:
  • Wireless Realtech rtl8192se this just is not stable yet, the latest version worked for about 20 Min then kernel trap. I found the driver on Realtech site and this ubuntoo site: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/401126?comments=all . There has been alot of activity so maybe it will get fixed.
  • I tried to put a 60G OCZ SSD in this and it worked great but Suspend /Resume would not always power the drive back up, I suspect a BIOS issue but there are no new versions of the BIOS yet out, that I could find.
  • I have the 60G OCZ SSD in again after a firmware upgrade seems better but once in a suspend it doesn't seem to come back. For now I am living with it.
  • Sound out of speakers works, but soft, headphone will not mute speakers, no mic works
  • Skype works with USB cam without issues use uvcvideo driver, but no int mic works.
  • Using the 2.6.33.3 kernel the headphone will not mute
Usb stuff that works :
  • ralink USB b/g/n with driver rt2870sta 500K + downloads, no problems
  • USB 5 channel Audio works great with alsa.
Misc stuff:

  • Runs very hot sometimes you need something on you lap to not get burned , then after a few hours the mouse seems to go crazy I think the hole unit is overheating this is a classic Toshiba problem IE Overheating . If I run it at 800 mhz it does not overheat but runs a lot slower
  • It is fast for a laptop, battery time is almost 4 hours but depends on how hard CPU is running.
Conclusion:
  • Wireless sucks, Sound sucks, Overheats, Mouse support sucks, SSD sucks, this laptop sucks for Linux. The MSI u230 is starting to look good they use a realtech sound chip, athro wireless, and a normal type of mouse and they have support of SSD, maybe this is the way to go.

3 comments:

  1. Installed Ubuntu out of the box and it worked well, except for being unable to find the microphone (hence, no Skype). No problem with wireless. Yes, toshibas overheat but that's not an OS_specific problem. Same with the touchpad: I find it to be too sensitive, and prone to malfunction when any torque is applied near the front of the laptop, but again that's not an OS problem. Biggest gripe with Ubuntu is that the machine will spontaneously freeze -- not a software problem AFAIK, more like drivers? (Net search suggests there is a bug in its polling of devices.)

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  2. There is a recall on this Toshiba for the touch pad, and yes non of the issues are OS issues IE was just reporting on the hardware. The sound hardware is not supported well thus the microphone issue, I had lots of problems with the hardware and drivers with this machine and it sounds like you had issues also. This is just not a good machine for Linux, maybe someone will fix the drivers and it will work but as I write this it is not.

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  3. Thinkpad t61 , whatever linux distro - it always overheats compared to Windows

    Tested on various linux distros and kernels 2.6.x - 3.11.1 --- in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 ... nothing really changes
    fuck off linux, usable only in VM on thinkpad....



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