Installation log: Ubuntu 8.04.1 on a Toshiba Satellite Pro L300
This is a log of my efforts to get Linux going on my shiny (and cheap) L300. I kept this log because I wished someone else had put one on their website when I was installing ubuntu myself.
I've never been entirely confident with Linux, but Ubuntu is supposed to be a distribution that makes things easy and Just Works™. Sadly I did not find this to be the case.
Basic Install
To start with, I downloaded the Ubuntu install CD. I turned the laptop off, put it in the drive, turned it on, and hammered F12 like a pneumatic drill.
Wait for OS to load from CD, get into X, find the welcome screen, choose timezone. [Show offtopic timezone rant]
Wait for OS to load from CD, get into X, find the welcome screen, choose timezone. [Hide offtopic timezone rant]
Ubuntu is badly-behaved when it comes to timezones. The sensible way to deal with time on a computer is to store UTC in the hardware clock and to use software to convert this to local time as and when needed. For the reasons for this, please see Markus Kuhn's excellent page on this issue. In any case, Ubuntu's default install changes the hardware clock to match local time. This is wrong in itself, but since I am dual-booting windows XP, both operating systems will try to adjust for daylight savings; this results in a 2-hour jump.
Now, I don't know from the timezone selection screen how much of my further install will be affected by my choice of city. If it were just timezone, I would choose Casablanca, because it is GMT and has no daylight saving. However, worried that the choice of city would affect other settings such as apt servers, I chose London and resolved to fix the icky time issue later.
Also, for some reason the click-on-world-map interface didn't seem to work. I clicked on cities in Europe and it selected cities in Brazil. I had to use the combobox to select London in the end.
Then select keyboard map again, and prepare disk space. [Show detail]
Then select keyboard map again, and prepare disk space. [Hide detail]
I went for a manual partition, with three partitions:
- sda1 : ext3, formatted, mount point /, ~60Gb
- sda2 : swap, ~2Gb
- sda3 : ntfs (Windows XP), ~60Gb
Information about partitioning your hard disk is beyond the scope of this log, but there are plenty of HOWTOs out there.
Enter user info, name computer, and import documents and settings from my XP profile -- though later I was unable to see what effect this had had.
Finally, start the install of the base Ubuntu system. Wait 15 minutes or so, restart machine, remove CD, get into X11, log in, and straight away change the sound settings so you don't have to hear irritating login noises or system beeps again. These noises are especially annoying during lectures and other talks, and the laptop has a software volume control which you can't really rely on to shut the thing up (it doesn't affect the system beep at all). My previous laptop, a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100, had a proper potentiometer volume control. Happy days.
The following worked perfectly straight away:
- Sound (including the soft volume control on the front)
- Graphics at the natural resolution of 1280x800
- USB: confirmed by USB stick test
-
GL: glxgears runs at 700fps but
I found the following warnings in
/var/log/Xorg.0.log:
(WW) intel(0): Bad V_BIOS checksum
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims not to support visual 0x23
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims not to support visual 0x24
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims not to support visual 0x25
(...continues...)
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims not to support visual 0x32
I don't know the significance of these errors. Compiz runs fine, anyway. - Suspend.
The following was mostly working...
- Wired networking is temparamental. Sometimes, when I boot up (or resume from hibernate) it works perfectly -- plug in a network cable and it is automatically detected and DHCP'd and you're ready to go. Other times it won't respond to any kind of coercion -- it claims there is always a network, even with no cable present, and all connections just time out; this is doubly annoying because it will block the wireless network with this spurious network. No amount of ifconfig eth0 down; ifconfig eth0 up fixes this problem. So far, I haven't found a pattern.
- Power management. I don't know how much support Linux has for power management, but it's clearly less than Windows. The System→Preferences→Power Management dialog doesn't provide nearly as much features as the Toshiba-supplied Windows XP tool, which has support for 8 levels of screen brightness, changing processor speed, and various other nice things. Ubuntu only has support for checkboxes "reduce backlight brightness" and "dim display when idle".
- Hibernate. The option was there, but when I restarted after a hibernate, it took just as long as normal to boot up and I had a "Your computer failed to hibernate" notification. Having said that, all my old programs were still running so I'm not sure what's going on really. At the suggestion of this forum postI ran sudo apt-get install hibernate and I haven't seen the error since, but again I don't know if this is actually related. Update: Hibernate broke last time I used it. The screen went blank and caps lock started flashing (!)
And the following didn't work at all...
- Wireless. Of course.
I used synaptic to update and upgrade all currently installed packages, and finally changed my timezone to Africa/Casablanca to fix the earlier timezone headaches.
Also, don't forget to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst if you want Windows to boot by default, or if you want the coloured menu which is far more visually pleasing.
Wireless
Then began the quest to get the wireless working.
According to this page from toshiba, there are a number of different wireless chipsets that an L300 may come with. The ones on the toshiba page were all Intel 3945ABG or Atheros, but when I opened mine up it seems the chipset is a Realtek RT8187B. I found this from a label inside the battery compartment.
The output of lsusb includes the following line corresponding to the wireless device, which confirms my Realtek suspicions:
Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0bda:8198 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
I found this page at help.ubuntu.com detailing how to get a RTL8187b-type card working. It involves a fairly foolproof-looking cookbook for installing a new driver. I followed it to the letter, restarted, and nothing happened. In fact the wired network stopped working too, though I'm not sure that was related.
I found out that it wasn't working because my card has a slightly different signature to those that the driver expects. The driver will accept 8197 or 8189 but not 8198 (see the output to lsusb above). Instructions for how to change the driver to work with 8198 cards were found on a Russian forum, which was fun because I don't know a word of Russian. However between the clues there and the help.ubuntu.com article, it made sense.
To make things easy, I've written an 8198 wireless guide which covers everything to get wireless up and running.
One last thing -- while writing this article, I'm sshed into the doc.ic.ac.uk servers and running vim From time to time it would just freeze up and stop responding to commands; however, after a while it would unfreeze and rapidly execute everything which had buffered during the frozen period. I haven't diagnosed where in the connection problems are occurring. ping -f to my router reported 0.01% loss over 37351 packets.
Power management
I get much worse power management under Ubuntu than Windows by default. Not only that, but the power management dialog is woefully inadequate compared to the Toshiba-supplied Windows dialog. I have a choice of "bright" or "dim"; under windows, I have 8 brightness levels and I have 3 processor performance levels.
There's talk over at the Ubuntu brainstorm that this is a problem with Ubuntu; but it suggests powertop for the moment.
I edited /etc/default/acpi-support, found the line containing ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE, and set it to 'true'.
Then I installed powertop to see what would happen.
Philip Potter, 14th August 2008