Toshiba R100

Toshiba R100

I found a Toshiba Portégé R100 lying around at work. I was between portables at the time, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to dust it off and see how well it performed with Linux.

hardware

  • 768M of RAM,
  • 1Ghz Pentium M
  • trident microsystems cyberblade xp4m32 (xorg trident driver)

Ubuntu

I had an Ubuntu 10.04 i386 install CD available so I used that. I used an external USB CD-ROM to boot from. Contrary to some reports on the web, the R100 BIOS can boot from an external CD-ROM drive. Perhaps it is just picky about which ones it likes? The BIOS version in this R100 is 1.50 (release 11/25/2004).

Initial thoughts

Sound playback is a bit stuttery and I got two login noises playing over themselves on initial login. I turned gnome sounds off so I don't know if this was a one-off.

The screen resolution is about an inch short of the bevel on all sides of the display. xrandr reports the resolution to be 800x600 (and that the maximum resolution is 800x600). The native resolution looks like it should be nearer 1024x768. This xorg.conf solves the problem. I need to pair this xorg down a bit to figure out which instructions precicely are required (probably a subset). Really, the X driver should discover the correct values.

Occasionally on login the VGA resolution switches to something daft - X thinks it is 1024x768 but it's a zoomed in corner of the screen. Switching VTs cures this.

I haven't convinced the laptop to suspend via pm-suspend within X - I just get a blinking cursor on a console window. Outside X, echo mem > /sys/power/state works, but I haven't convinced it to resume again.