Re: Debian GNU/linux on Toshiba laptops

["Jeffrey Knight" <knight@ru4.com>]

Martin:
I don't know about that model, but I have a tecra8000.
It's Ok; i've had to deal with the "tecra bug", meaning bzImages don't boot.
That's been a bit of a pain, making installation less-than-straight forward
(you won't be able to boot off a *debian* cdrom--althought SuSE, for
example, works fine (??)).
XFree was not exactlty a picnic to setup using Debian either but, again, it
can be done (it's easy with SuSE's sax). I've got XFree86 v.4 working, and
will be happy to share my (somewhat hacked) config file.
Toshiba's internal modem is a winmodem, but i hear people have gotten it to
work.

ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/slink/main/disks-i386/2.1.12-1999-12-09/RE
ADME-tecra reads:
Tecras and other notebooks [i don't know what 'other' notebooks this applies
to! -jk]
--------------------------
   (Many thanks to Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> and
           Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@worldvisions.ca> for this explanation)

Tecras and other notebooks, and some PCs have a problem where they
fail to flush the cache when switching on the a20 gate (IIRC), which
is provoked by bzImage kernels, but not by zimage kernels.

bzImage files are actually "big zImage" not "bzipped Image".  bzImage
kernels can be as large as you like, but because they need to decompress
into extended memory, they aggravate this problem.  zImage kernels just
compress into conventional memory, so they never need to touch the a20 gate,
but they hit the 640k limit.

There are two solutions that I know of:

  1) apply a patch, which flushes the cache.  Unfortunately this
     causes other machines to crash so is not universally applicable
     (hence the tecra disks being segragated from the mainstream)

  2) build a zimage, rather than bzimage kernel.  This seems to get
     round the problem. use the --zimage option to make-kpkg, or even
     set this as the default in /etc/kernel-pkg.conf.
--------------------------
-jeff