Linux on the Toshiba Satellite 1110-Z15

Disclaimer: The author is not responsible for the correctness of the information here, or any consequences resulting from the use of any information provided here.

Introduction

With all the intellectual input coming from my friend, Jules, my machine is now running as dual boot with Windows XP Home and Redhat 8.0.

Getting started

We started with with the machine as sold: a single FAT32 partition. It was my intention to have 3 partitions, 10Gb:10Gb:10Gb, one for WinXP, one for Redhat and a third, readable by both, for data. My initial attempts with FIPS bore no fruit. We used Partition Magic to shrink the initial WinXP Home partition to 10 Gb.

I burnt the Linux distribution onto CDs. Stuck the first one into the optical drive, booted from it, and we were off.

The Installation

An initial problem, reported elsewhere, is the inability to get the installation started with the default installation options. Instead, install using the nopcmcia nousb options, i.e. type

linux nopcmcia nousb

at the first prompt. This way, you'll get beyond a stalled machine with a blue screen. Everything thereafter goes very smoothly.

Disc Druid was used to generate a 10 Gb partition for Linux Root (denoted ext3) and a 768 Mb Swap partition.

My only crisis came when prompted for screen refresh rates. I guessed to go with the defaults, which were 31.5-48.5 Horizontal and 50-70 Hz Vertical. Sadly, this did not sit well with running at 1024x768 at 24 bit colour depth. Increasing the vertical range to 50-100 Hz appears to have sorted this out.

Following installation, Partition Magic was used to create the last partition of the remaining disk space (approx 10 Gb) and format it as FAT 32.

At this stage, I have no use of the built-in modem under Linux, and use XP for home internet connections. Father, forgive me.

If you have any further questions, e-mail me. pgriff at sdf hyphen eu dot org