Installing SuSE Linux 7.3 on a Toshiba Portégé 7220CT
The Toshiba Portégé 7220CT consists of two units: a slim light base unit which contains the computer proper, the batteries, "winmodem" and a PCMCIA port, and a detachable Docking Station which contains the drives for removable media and the connecting sockets for peripherals (parallel, USB, serial, PS/2, video, TV and others). If no mouse is connected then the screen pointer is controlled by the Toshiba Trackpoint, a pressure-sensitive transducer located in the middle of the keyboard and covered with a green plastic grommet.
The machine used for this installation was a factory-reconditioned model fitted with a 650 MHz Pentium III cpu, a 11.2 GB hard disk, and 192 MB RAM. The video card was an S3 Savage IX with 64-bit AGP, 8 MB SGRAM and BitBLT processor. The Docking Station was equipped with a floppy drive, DVD drive and ESS Maestro sound card and miniature speakers.
This particular computer came with a blank formatted DOS partition of 2 GB, which was deleted during installation of Linux.
Most aspects of the installation were very straightforward, but there were a few pitfalls and it is worth noting them here. If the BIOS settings need changing, access can be obtained by pressing Esc immediately after switching on, followed by F1. The BIOS was set to boot from the floppy drive, and with the SuSE boot floppy in place and CD No 1 in the DVD drive, YaST2 soon took over.
It is quite possible to accept the partitioning scheme suggested by YaST2, but if you want to set up your own partitions, be aware that SuSE 7.3 has a bug which prevents the root partition being set up as ext3. If you choose ext3 during installation, everything will appear to progress properly, and will indeed work, but you will end up with an ext2 root partition. This does not affect other partitions such as /boot or /home.
If you want a journalling file-system, you can either accept this and download the fix later from the SuSE web-site, or choose ReiserFS for the root partition (this is SuSE's preferred choice).
Installation of the so-called default system, which includes all the basic Linux operating system and KDE2, took less than half an hour. The Toshiba Trackpoint was detected and configured satisfactorily. The automatic detection of the video card and display worked very well and enabled a 1024 x 768 16-bit display at 70 Hz to be set up. At the end of this time YaST2 invites you to configure your hardware. It is probably better finish the basic installation and do that later.
Setup of an Epson Photo 750 printer on the USB connection was quickly done by the automatic hardware configuration tool of YaST2.
An Epson 1240 Perfection scanner (USB) was not automatically detected but was easily set up manually with YaST2.
External keyboard, mouse and monitor could be used with no additional configuration. No equipment was available to try the PCMCIA facility.
Configuration of the sound card with YaST2 failed. Choosing "normal configuration" resulted in an immediate freeze of the whole system, and required a reboot. Choosing "quick configuration" appeared to work, but on the next attempt to start KDE, the system again froze. These crashes appeared to be quite damaging; the root partition became corrupted on two occasions and re-installation from scratch was required.
The problem is caused by an incompatibility between the ESS Maestro sound chip and the Alsa module of this distro. The problem is documented on the SuSE website where two solutions are described. The second of these was adopted, as it is very simple:
Do not attempt to configure the sound card with YaST2!
As root, open
/etc/modules.conf
in any editor and find the following entries, around line 43:
alias char-major-14 off
alias sound off
alias midi off
and change them to
alias char-major-14 maestro
# alias sound off
# alias midi off
Then starting a sound program such as kmix should load the module maestro.o and give sound. If you have already tried using YaST2 then it may be necessary to remove some entries from /etc/modules.conf. The SuSE website gives details. This solution does not use Alsa and no attempt should be made to configure it. If you want to use programs that depend on Alsa then you will need to follow the first solution given on the SuSE support page; unfortunately the hyperlink to the driver file is defunct.
The sound quality from the two tiny speakers in the docking station is abysmal but a pair of headphones will allow you to enjoy listening to Mozart, or whatever.
The Lucent winmodem is one which is supported by the software available from www.linmodems.org The hazard here is not the risk of a crash but the obvious need for another computer to download the necessary files. Fortunately they are small enough to fit on a floppy.
There is a driver, ltmodem-kv_2.4.10_4GB-6.00b4-1.i386.rpm, which is supposed to work on this distro with this modem, but installing this produced an error message, and more to the point, it did not work. It was necessary to use the program ltmodem-8.22a5.tar.gz This compiles a driver suited to the individual computer.
It requires the kernel header files to be available. If they are not already installed, the kernel sources must be installed from the distro CDs; this is a large package at around 160 MB but it can be removed aftrwards if you do not need it. In the directory /usr/src/linux issue the command make xconfig. The settings obtained by loading the file /boot/vmlinuz.config are suitable. Save and exit, and then enter make dep. That is all that is needed to produce the kernel headers.
After opening the tarball, change to the ltmodem-8.22a5 directory, enter ./build_module and follow the prompts. After making the driver the program will create a device file /dev/ttyLTO and a symbolic link from /dev/modem. At the end of the process it will offer the option of creating an rpm package for the newly made driver.
For some reason wvdial could not automatically detect the modem, but using kppp, connection to the internet was successful.
This versatile office suite is not part of the SuSE distro but many users will want to install it. However attempting to install it from the self-installation package in which it normally comes will result in a freeze-up of the system. This arises out of a bug in XF86 version 4.1.0 which is supplied with SuSE 7.3.
The best solution is to upgrade to the latest version of XF86, which was 4.2.0 at the time of writing. Although the necessary rpm files can be downloaded from SuSE's website, which also gives full instructions for installation, they amount to more than 50 MB. Therefore buying a CD from Linux Emporium or other supplier might be easier (even though you might have to compile from the source) unless you have access to a broadband connection.
Upgrading is by far the best solution as there are programs other than OpenOffice.org which can trigger the freeze-up. However if you have no access to the Internet or are deterred by the thought of a 50 MB download, and really need to get OOo installed, then the following is said to work:
In the OOo install directory, issue the command:
export SAL_DO_NOT_USE_INVERT50=true
and then proceed normally, that is:
./setup
or, as root
./setup -net
to enable more than one user to use the software.
Installation of SuSE 7.3 on the Portégé 7220CT is largely very straightforward. The main difficulty is the configuration of the soundcard, athough there are other problems associated with XF86, the file-system and the modem.