Re: Debian/GNU Linux on the Toshiba Tecra S1
Very useful information.
You haven't made it clear whether you succeeded in getting any battery status output. I have tried the fix you described with kernel 2.4.23 but without any joy. Is this what it was meant to fix? Not having battery status is a real annoyance!
I have no problems at all with keyboard/touchpad (I'm using an S1 with the 1.90 BIOS). I did have problems like this with an earlier BIOS after warm reboots from Windows. In general, I find that warm reboots cause problems when switching between Windows and Linux (in either direction), so I always power down now. You might want to ensure that you have all the kernel options set correctly to pick up various mouse types - I think I just enabled all of them...
Hardware video 3D acceleration seems to work with 2.4.23, but I couldn't get it to work with 2.6.0-test11 (according to the output of glxinfo).
I'm not entirely convinced that speedstep is working correctly. At best, it seems only to switch between the highest and lowest possible speeds, and remains at the higher speed for about 5 seconds after the extra power is no longer needed (according to /proc/cpuinfo) - but acpi/processor/CPU0/performance just seems to indicate the processor running at full-speed permanently (or am I just looking at the wrong thing?)
However, the CPU fan only seems to come on when I'm running intensive processes, so the heat generated seems to indicate that the processor is changing speeds. Not sure how else I can work this out, short of timing how long the battery takes to run out...
I can only get a single reading from hardware sensors, which appears to be the CPU temp, but perhaps that is the only sensor present?
The lack of toshiba function keys is annoying - its useful to be able to change LCD brightness, and switch LCD/CRT/TV output, but we don't seem to have the option. Its a shame that this particular model seems to have a different BIOS from the usual toshiba laptops, as the specially written linux kernel additions don't work here giving the message "not a supported toshiba laptop" on boot.
On the whole, I give this machine the thumbs up for use with linux, but there do seem to be a few small problems.
_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!
Reply to: