Linux on a Toshiba Tecra 740 Laptop

Some comments on installing Linux on a Tecra 740, from the ground up. When you get the machine, you are steered through a menu to prepare your machine for Windows 95 (Windows 3.1, one of your choice). This description should eventually wind up in the official official Tecra Laptop Page, maintained by Jens Maurer (I also keep a local copy, but that may be out of date). See also Chris Wilson's Tecra page (I also keep a local copy, but that may again be out of date).

First a summary of the specs and my basic conclusions (in which I have also merged comments from the people acknowledged at the bottom)

CPU: P166 w/ MMX (320 bogoMIPS)
144Mb memory on board (I believe this is the max) Standard PCI bus.
onboard 28.8 modem (COM2).
13.x" Active Matrix. Handles 1024*768 (download my XF86Config file, but use at your own risk).
Trackstick PS/2 mouse.
APM (seems to work fine, but check below the PCMCIA comments)
2.1Gb removable hard drive. (now generally available w/ 3Gb)
standard 1.44M floppy (you can get them as internal only, or as internal/external through the SelectBay. Under certain rough circumstances booting from the floppy appears only to work from the SelectBay.
10x CDROM, in a SelectBay
PCMCIA: 2 standard slots. Can be configured as CardBus(16bit) or PCIC. Linux can only deal with PCIC though. Make sure it's set PCIC in the BIOS setup.

Slackware96 (3.2)

Standard installation, no problems to report yet, apart from generic slackware 3.2 problems that I know about (e.g. bash, lprTNG)

Potential Problems

Perhaps not everybody will agree here, or has different experiences, but these are some of the "features" I'm less impressed with:

speakers; loud at startup, and bad quality

Bizarre Problems

Here is a list of bizarre occurences I had on the machine. Some of them really don't have a reasonable explanation yet, although one can always suspect the bad disk cache/bad memory problem I may have on this machine.

PCMCIA: When turning the machine into resume mode, the PCMCIA cards must be taken out. If you leave any in (we only tested SCSI and Ethernet) it will hang the machine at boot, and force you to reboot. And that will generally succeed.
At one instance of the above the machine came back and claimed the PCIC interface was not found! A complete powerdown (removed battery and power) and BIOS toggle back to CardBus and back to PCIC (not sure if the latter was important).
I've now seem postings that a BIOS 5.5 upgrade has solved this suspend with PCMCIA card in WinNT (and thus likely in linux). Not seem any linux confirmations yet.
FAT32: if you care about keeping Window95 on a partition, but want to use FIPS to split your drive, here is something we found on a recent T730XCDT: after FIPS has done it's good work you may not be able to reboot the machine as it complains about some corrupted VFAT entry. In fact, if you're unlucky, you may not even (seemingly) be able to boot from the bootfloppy. The solution is twofold: take the internal CDROM out and replace it with the floppy, then boot from the bootfloppy that you created from which you run FIPS to begin with, and run "SYS C:" to restore the main FAT table (or whatever it's called). Obviously FIPS is at fault, since it doesn't know about FAT32 yet, but until this has been fixed, this will actually work. (August 1997)
Some weird BIOS "reset" problems, which forced us to reflash the BIOS. One of the symptoms was that the PCMCIA cards appeared dead. Claiming no interface found etc. See toshiba's site for BIOS updates Could it be because of running the laptop through the X ray machine at the airport, or travelling at 35,000 feet?? It has now happened 2 times in not even 1/2 year.

Also visit the Linux Laptop Page and the Tecra Forum

See also Jonathan Buzzard's Toshiba Utilities Page

July 1, 1999, Toshiba opened op the Linux support for Toshiba PC page.

Acknowledgements:

Last updated: 1-jul-99

Problems, Suggestions, Solutions? Email: teuben@astro.umd.edu