HTW des Saarlandes - Prof. Dr.-Ing. Damian Weber - Fakultät IngWi HTW



Toshiba Satellite 2410-404

Notebook Linux Installation

I just installed SuSE 7.3 Linux on a new Toshiba Satellite 2410-404 Notebook.

Why SuSE? Easy install. Years of experience with the distribution.
Why 7.3? There are numerous frustrated reports concerning SuSE 8.0. There are less frustrated reports concerning SuSE 8.1, though.

In the meantime I did an upgrade to kernel 2.4.19 without trouble.

The Toshiba comes neatly packed, you see the people have thought about how to put it in the package. As usual you cannot get it without Windows XP. By unpacking it, you comply with the usual agreement on installed software (e.g. WinXP Home), although you'll never start it.

A NVidia graphics adapter works inside. So before the purchase, a look at the NVidia website told me they are nice to Linux users and provide drivers for all of their cards.

You start playing lottery w.r.t. the installed network device on board which is only mentioned as 10/100 MBit LAN interface. With trial-and-error the e100 driver was found to be appropriate. Simply put an 
insmod e100
at the most convenient place within the boot process.

The otherwise splendid handbook lacks a crucial detail, namely how to get into BIOS. For Windows users this is not needed since there is a Windows program installed for this purpose. On a UK site I found the solution for another Toshiba notebook and it worked for the Satellite 2410 too:
When you power up, hold down the Escape key, until you're asked to press F1.
What is annoying is the limited choice of boot sequence: on CD, the 2nd device is always LAN. There is no combination that allows you to simply remove the CD and boot from floppy. I manually selected a boot sequence that starts with FDD.
A better way to solve this is to press F12 during boot, which fires up a temporary boot device selection with symbolic device icons (hint by thorsten.haas@gmx.de).

Sound works splendidly. I didn't bother to configure ALSA, instead I figured out the required modules to be added via boot.local: 
   soundcore sound ac97 ac97_codec v_midi uart401 cmpci i810_audio


The CD burner is activated as usual by using the module ide-scsi. Typing 
   cdrecord -scanbus
finds the device at SCSI 0,0,0 (scsibus,target,lun), where it is ready to start burning.

In SuSE's yast2 installer I skipped X11 Configuration, because I wanted to run XFree86 4.2 with the latest NVidia drivers which you can download from their homepage.
Having these installed I wanted to configure X11 via SaX2 but it came up with an unacceptable 640x480 proposal. Redefining the monitor capabilities to 1024x768@70Hz solved this problem.
On the other hand, SaX2 had no problem to get the touchpad working.
Instead of struggling with your X11 configuration, you may download my XF86Config file; notice, that the German keyboard is configured, change it via options "XkbLayout" and "XkbModel". There are two XF86Config versions:

I didn't bother with the following features of this Laptop: IrDA, Modem, Firewire, TV-OUT, PCMCIA, where the first two of this list are probably looking for trouble.


The bottom line is that the Toshiba Satellite 2410-404 is a great notebook which doesn't require much effort/headache/frustration (you name it) to get Linux working.


For a much more detailed report on a Debian installation see Thorsten's Toshiba 2410 page.


Disclaimer: This document is without any guarantee. The author will not bear any responsibility if there are any damage or data loss after any reader uses this information. Use this at your own risk.

Damian Weber, http://www-crypto.htw-saarland.de/weber/misc/linux/toshiba-2410.html


page updated Oct 3, 2009