I got my new laptop today, a Toshiba Satelite L30.
It came preinstalled with Windows Vista home basic, there was no way I was using that of course.
Now the L30 proved to be a little harder than most to get PCLinuxOS working on unfortunately. It kept hanging in the network setup. In the end I chose to skip that on the live cd and just install first.
On a hunch, I grabbed the madwifi-dkms packages from synaptic on my desktop, copied it onto a memory stick and installed on the laptop. Next boot I had networking. The atheros wifi card and realtek ethernet card worked nicely from then on.
When I installed linux on the laptop I opted for resising the Vista NTFS partition down so that I could dualboot. I may not want to use vista, but windows does have one purpose on my computers – testing and compiling windows versions of my linux apps like OKWin.
Afterward, vista refused entirely to function… it just got stuck on crcdisk.sys. Even the VISTA install disk would not boot. Some checking confirmed this to be a common error, and basically that there is no concensus on the fix. Ultimately I had one advantage – there was no data there, so I just destroyed the vista partition entirely and could then reinstall to a new partition. Don’t ask me about the time and effort to wipe and replace the partition with a blank unformatted one – just enough to fool the windows installer. Once it was done though, all was good.
Of course I still have no clue how to get a mac address under vista, which is the major security on my wifi network at home – luckilly it’s easy under Linux, and the mac’s don’t change.
The only remaining factor is to get my linux sound working, though this seems to be a documented thing on the L30, pretty much everyone confirms it needs some alsa hacking – that is next on my agenda.
UPDATE: I got the sound going – proved to be not that hard, though there were two separate problems to solve. Problem one was the alsa version – you need the latest and greatest 1.0.14 release to get this card going at all. Luckilly you can get a DKMS version of this baby right there in synaptic. Install it, and wait (it takes a while to build). Once it is done, you can deal with problem 2. Problem 2 is that this driver doesn’t identify it’s mixer channels properly. To fix it, go into control-center, then hardware, sound, run configuration tool and click “set options for current driver”. Under model add “6stack-digout”. To put this in geeky-any-distro speak: edit /etc/modprobe.conf and before the line that says
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
insert a line that reads
options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-digout
Faking the 6-stack digital-output model of the card presents all the mixer channels – and a few extras which don’t do anything, the last step is done in kmix, the “master” channel will be set to pc-speaker (which will probably be zeroed at that), change your master channel to “front” and unmute all the channels. Voila – sound works. For more information see this thread on the ubuntu forums.
Technorati Tags: Toshiba, Satelite L30, Vista, L30, PCLinuxOS, live cd, madwifi-dkms, synaptic, atheros, linux, OKWin, crcdisk.sys, mac address, sound, alsa, DKMS
