Linux Blog

If you read my post about my Toshiba Portege 4010 you would know that I mentioned in their that it was a little too slow. I couldn’t do the things I needed to do, such as virtualization or play Quake3. So for an early Christmas present to I sold my Toshiba Portege 4010 and I purchased a used Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop. The specs are pretty decent for the amount I paid for it.

CPU: 1.7GHz PM
RAM: 512MB (Needs upgrading)
HD: 40GB -> Upgraded to 100GB
Graphics: GeForce Fx 5200 toGo 64MB.
Media: CDRW-DVD Combo, Firewire, USB 2.0, 2PCMCIA Card Slots
Network: 10/100/1000 B/G Wireless

The battery life is not as good as my old Portege 4010 but with the time I save by not waiting on the CPU I can normally get my Quake3 I mean work done in time to find a power outlet.

The Tecra M2 has excellent support for Linux. The only thing thats not supported that I’m working on is the SD Card reader. This is the same situation as the Portege’s as they use the same hardware.

I’ll be making a post for any body wanting to run a real Linux distribution on a Toshiba Tecra M2.

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I’ve got a new to me video card to temporarily service as my video card until I can get a cooling kit for my GeForce FX 5200. Its an older GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AGP8X. I thought it would be as simple as plugging it into my agp slot, turning the computer on and re-installing the NVIDIA driver module but I was wrong.

The problem is, since this is an older card I have to use a legacy driver:

WARNING: The NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X GPU installed in this system
is supported through the NVIDIA 1.0-96xx legacy Linux graphics
drivers. Please visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for
more information. The 100.14.11 NVIDIA Linux graphics driver will
ignore this GPU.

If you can’t see the screen shot click it. Its basically a pretty version of the above error message that tells me that I need to use the: “NVIDIA 1.0-96xx legacy Linux Driver”. Here is the download page for the driver if your running into the same problem: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_x86_96.43.01.html

You can temporarily use the “nv” driver in your XORG configuration but be warned this is not accelerated so you should just use it to download the legacy driver, quit X and then install the accelerated one. Unfortunately I could not get links or lynx to download from nVidia’s site because of some strange javascript code. I find it Ironic that the Unix drivers page isn’t even compatible with the basic Unix browsers.

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At the moment I am a little unhappy with my Linux Box. It was making funny sounds (more than normal) the other night so I decided to turn it off. When I turned it back on, it was making even more racket. Turns out that my video card has been toasted, literally. The picture on the left shows the damage. Its pretty evident that the fan stopped spinning and burned up.

So much for my 128MB GeForce FX 5200.

I have an older GeForce laying around somewhere but I’ll have to use the legacy drivers. Until I find the card don’t fear I’ll be continuing to blog on my laptop. Which isn’t the best machine to use, but it will get the job done. Also from this experience I have thought of an blog post to write: dealing with hardware failure.

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Along with my desktop I also have a laptop that is in dire need of an upgrade. It is a Toshiba Portege 4010. Although its age and its specifications (or lack of) it is still a decent ultra portable laptop. The battery life is great (4-6 hours) and its very light weight. Here are the specs:

CPU: 933MHz Pentium M
Ram: 512MB Shared
HD: 100GB Seagate 5400RPM
Media: CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive.
Network: Integrated 10/100 & Orinoco B Wifi.

I like its slim line style and cool features like the SD Card Reader, Firewire, Infrared and Toshiba Select Bay. But unfortunately I’ve not been able to get the SD Card or Infrared to work. The video card is also lacking, its a Trident Cyberblade and it doesn’t have very good support. I have to run X in VESA frame buffer mode which isn’t as bad as it sounds but without tweaking it is unable to play DVD’s.

The Toshiba ACPI extras work really well in conjunction with fnfxd. Brightness, Volume, Screen Change and Lock Screen are the only short cuts I set up. The system also suspends to disk & ram with no problems.

I also run Slackware 12 on my laptop and have trimmed it down to boot Linux faster and provide better battery life. It boots to login in about 30 seconds. The picture above is a picture I took in the kitchen. The desktop is XFCE from Slackware-current, click on the image to view more photos of my Toshiba Portege 4010.

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Maybe its just me but I find it interesting to look at other peoples computer stuff so I’m going to take the time to write some blog posts about my hardware.

First in my lineup is my Desktop. This is by no means a new computer but runs very well.
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Motherboard: MSI KT400
Memory: 512MB DDR 333
Hard Drive: 160GB Maxtor
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce FX5200
Ethernet: ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere 10/100
Media Devices: CD-RW, Floppy, ATA133 Hard Drive Bay
Monitor: LG 19″ Flat Panel. DVI, VGA, 1280×1024. 4ms 1400:1
Keyboard/Mouse: Generic Staples $10 special and a unknown brand painted laser mouse.

Every device is supported by the 2.6 kernel and Linux runs very well on it. The motherboard uses a VIA chip set and a C-Media audio device. The CPU is
actually 1875.733 MHz with a 512KB cache. According to cat /proc/cpuinfo it has a bogomips rating of 3754.8

Now comes the sensitive part, my distro of choice. For some this is a sour topic but I’ll just say that it doesn’t really matter to me. I run windows on it before and most Linux distributions out perform it out of the box (after installing video drivers.) I choose to run Slackware 12 on it because of the simplicity. It took a little while to configure it how I like but it turned out pretty well. I use slackpkg to keep it current.

I’ll be sure to post some pictures of the setup some time.

Thats about all I have to say about my desktop, if you have any questions or would like any additional information just give me an e-mail at: owen @ thelinuxblog.com

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I’ve added a new category to The Linux Blog. It is called: “Linux hardware” Any posts I make that include a specific device or device setup will be found in this category. It will also be used to post news about upcoming devices, devices I wish I had and anything else related to hardware.
Now I have to do a pitch: If any readers have questions, cool new hardware, hardware to review or would like a showcase in The Linux Blog about their hardware please send an e-mail to me: owen @ thelinuxblog.com

Thats all for now folks!

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