Please note that this page is unmaintainted. After an exchange of letters with Toshiba, six months after buying the laptop, I accepted a full refund and bought a UMAX ActionBook 643T, which runs Linux fine and for which I got a no-quibble refund for unwanted and unused Windows operating system software.
So, please take what you can from this page but be aware that there are a lot of gaps to which other people have answers.

Installing RedHat 6.1 on a Toshiba Satellite 4090XCDT

Assumptions

Initial impressions

Getting started

X Setup

Sound

Modem

Problems

Assumptions

I assume that you are fairly experienced at installing RedHat, it's fairly painless these days anyway. I also assume that you know unix and most importantly that you understand that these instructions worked fine for me but don't blame me if they don't for you

Initial Impressions

What can I say? An object of desire indeed. It looks pretty good, the keyboard seemed a little bouncy at first but feels farily good to use. The mouse pointer is one of those annoying little buttons that I did not really want but did not look into things sufficiently ....
The screen had one faulty pixel, oh I can live with that, it sorts of adds character.
The machine full spec is available from lots of resellers, as well as Toshiba themselves. I bought mine from CCL Computer Systems Limited in Sheffield.
You get into the BIOS by pressing ESC when the machine boots, you are then prompted to press the F1 key.

Getting started

I put the RedHat 6.1 CD into the CDdrive and switched the Toshiba on, holding down the C key...it booted off the CD and started the RedHat installer. I pushed my luck and opted for the X installation method. The program politely refused so instead I went for the TEXT mode installer. This went fine. I expected to see a hibernation partition, but there was none, does the Windows installation create this? Dunno. I haven't really looked into it yet.
Select whatever installation model you want, I went for custom system.
Anyway, I deleted the Win FAT32 partition and wrote a letter to Toshiba to get the refund for Windows, as specified in the ELUA. But that's another story.
I have an irrational disklike of extended partititions, so I stuck to four but somehow my partition table ended up looking like this:-

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 526 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1       102    819283+  83  Linuxb
/dev/hda2           103       526   3405780    5  Extended
/dev/hda5           103       364   2104483+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6           365       377    104391   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7           378       526   1196811   83  Linux

I am only using linux so that was all I told lilo about. I instructed it to put the bootloader into the MBR. Then the installation went ahead and I went to do something else.

X Setup

After installing all the packages I asked for the installer ran Xconfigurator, the Toshiba manuals were slim on real technical details, but I had info that the video chipset was Trident Cyber 9525.
In the absence of technical data, trial and error kicked in, just like the good old days. I went for this:-

Chipset: Trident Cyber 9525 (generic)
Custom monitor:
	High Frequency SVGA 1024x768 @ 70 Hz
	50 - 70 vsync
	Don't probe
	2 meg (actually it's 2.5 - I will have to change this later)
	No clockchip
	16 bit 1024 x 768

Up came Gnome, easy.

Sound

As for sound setup, this was a bit more problematic.
I ran sndconfig and it suggested I get the beta driver for the ESS TEchnology ES1978 Maestro Audiodrive from http://people.redhat.com/zab/maestro. I got the release made on 19991012. I did a make all and a make install. I needed to turn up the volume of the speakers (using the Gnome mixer) but otherwise it was fine. I copied the maestro.o file to the modules directory /lib/modules/`uname -r`/misc and ran sndconfig again.
Sounds good? Yes, it did till I rebooted and the boot hung on starting pcmcia. I moved the /etc/conf.modules out of the way, it only contained the one line for the maestro driver, this fixed the hang-problem. I haven't worked out what is going on here, but for now I just insmod the driver when I want sound. If you know what the problem is please email me. Jakub Velimsky suggested putting modprobe maestro at the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
I got this info from Aaron Seigo

noticed your problems with freezing at boot up. mine started doing the
same, when loading the pcmcia module. my sound module was being loaded
at startup prior to pcmcia (through conf.modules) and i tracked it down
to that.. the pcmcia won't init and will lock up the system if the sound
is loaded prior to it... but if i load the maestro driver afterwards
(did it through my rc.local script) then all is good...

Modem

I know that the internal modem is a winmodem so I haven't even tried getting it working. Jakub Velimsky told me about this page http://www.close.u-net.com/, which may be of interest.

Problems

Sound

See above section on SOUND.

Freeze on boot

Sometimes the machine boots and then freezes as it offers the login, this is bad. I have only managed to fix it by powering the machine off...not nice.
I have had a few emails about this; Patrick Doyle said that he had a similar problem, and related it to PCMCIA, this seems to tie in with the problems I have with sound config. Thomas Stegbauer too though it related to PCMCIA initialisation and offered a work-around:-

hi mark,

i found your address from installing redhat on toshiba notebook :-)

you wrote you have problems, the machine starts up and freeze then.

i am using suse 6.2 and have the same problem, but only when
activating
the pcmcia support. if enabled the keyboard freeze at login, but the
machine is RUNNING!!!! you can reach it over the network.

funny solution, when starting directly into a graphic login (at suse
"init 3" - and i use kdm) the keyboard works, also on the console
when
switching to it with ctrl+alt+f1

maybe it helps you.

greetings from bavaria
thomas

I edited my /etc/inittab so that initdefault was 5 rather than 3 and, so far the problem has not reoccured. Thanks Thomas.
Perhaps the last word on this goes to Laslo Evers who sent me this email:-


Hi Mark,

I read your page about installing Redhat on a Toshiba 
laptop. I installed Redhat 6.0 on a 4100XCDT, which has 
more or less the same specifications as your machine.

I have solved the freezing of the laptop after booting, 
by disabling the start up of gpm service. I read this 
on an internet page (don't remember which one). Seems 
to be working ok, my machine has never frozen afterwards.

Regards,

Laslo Evers

it occured to me that starting xdm at bootup may have some impact on gpm. Maybe the PCMCIA problems are a red-herring. Thomas tells me that his machine sometimes freezes even when gpm is not running, I notice that my machine runs gpm under xdm. I guess that we have to many variables here. When I get a bit of free time I might look further into this, if you have anything new to add, please feel free to let me know.

Parallel port

Daniele Medri pointed out that the parallel port does not seem to be detected by linux. I ran printtool and, sure enough no lp ports were detected. This is not really a problem for me, I anticipate printing over the network to another PC, but...er, I suppose I like a problem so this is how I fixed it:-

I checked the BIOS and saw that "Plug and Play" was disabled. The settings I noted were Address=0x378, IRQ=7 DMA=3.
Boot the machine back up and as root, insmod parport.o You should then see /proc/parport/ appear.
Next initialise the PC-specific drivers by typing insmod parport_pc.o io=0x378 irq=7. You should then see /proc/parport/0/ appear. This means you have an lp0 and you should be able to configure a printer on it. I guess you can do this automatically if you want to. For further details look at http://www.cyberelk.demon.co.uk/parport.html

Other Thanks

To Paul Branston for burning the CD.
To Neil "bandwith" Brocklesby for downloading the image - ohh, at work too, tut tut.