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Attempt (Failed) to Install Red 9 onto Toshiba 1135
 

by R.M. Schneider, April 2003

The purpose of this short article is to report experience of my failed attemp to install Red Hat 9 on my new Toshiba 1135 laptop.  I'm listing the highlights, not every detail.  This may be of use to someone else attempting to put Red Hat Linux onto a Toshiba 1135.

In summary:  it did not work.   The disk made unusual "straining" noises when running Red Hat, and the graphics controller onboard the machine was not recognized by the Red Hat install program.  By not recognizing the graphics controller and having no information about how to make the X-server settings for it, it would only display inadequately at 800x600.  I chose to de-install Red Hat 9 and re-install a base Windows XP Professional operating system on this particular machine.

Initial Setup

The Toshiba 1135 laptop had Microsoft Windows XP Home pre-installed.  Soon after taking delivery of the machine, I upgraded it to XP Pro to enable it to join my home network domain (based on Linux Samba). 

Prior to doing this attempted install of Linux, I checked Linux on Laptops web page for other's experience with this machine, searched on Google, and looked at Toshiba's web resources.  Found nothing.

I used Partition Magic 7.0 to resize C: to make room for Linux.

This re-partitioning included:

  • small /boot partition before the 1024 cylinder barrier,
  • FAT32 E: disk (so could be readable by XP and Linux),
  • 800 mb Linux swap partition, and
  • used the rest of the disk (about 10 Gb at this point) for a Linux EXT3 file system.

The key components of this Toshiba 1135 has

  • 512 mb memory,
  • Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller
  • 40 gb hard disk
  • TEAC DW-224E DVD/CD-ROM Drive
  • Mobil Intel Celeron CPU (2.00 GHz)

Detailed specifications for this machine are published by Toshiba here.

I booted off the Linux 9 CD's (downloaded ISO image files from www.redhat.com and burned onto 3 CD's).  The CD's had been used successfully to upgrade a dual boot desktop (with Win 98) workstation from Red Hat 7.2 to 9. The Toshiba 1135 laptop booted successfully into the Red Hat install program (which is Linux).

Red Hat Installation

The install program successfully detected the relevant hardware components of the machine for the first part of the install.  I selected to install everything (since I had plenty of disk space). 

The install program started to work.  First thing I noticed was how noisy the the machine was during the install.  The CD drive was whirling, the fan running, and most significantly, the hard disk was making more noise that I had ever heard on that machine. It was clearly working very hard.  I didn't know if the hard disk noise was indicative of something destructive going on or not.  I was uncertain about whether to continue to to cancel the install. I chose to let it continue to completion.  Red Hat successfully rebooted into the second phase of the install where it tries to setup X-windows and the network. 

The second phase of the install program correctly identified the built-in network card and video adaptor, but could not identify the monitor/LCD screen.  It called it "un-probed".  Accordingly, it only setup base default screen resolutions of 640x480 and 800x600.  The install program laid down a new Master Boot Record with GRUB (the dual-boot control program). It automatically detected "dos" (which was actually XP Pro) and Linux.  I rebooted and GRUB came up OK.  Booting to XP Pro worked.   Also booting into Linux worked.

Unhappy with Results

However, the screen resolution was unacceptable to me and the hard disk was making too much noise, e.g like the extra noise I heard during the installation, during operation the disk seemed to work "too hard" compared to how it worked with XP Pro.  With reluctance, decided to remove Linux Red Hat 9.  I really wanted to have it as I enjoy exploring/learning, but it just didn't seem to work well enough.  The screen resolution was the biggest issue. I want 1024x768 minimum.  I could not find any references on Google for how to setup X-Windows on the Toshiba 1135.  So ... decided XP Pro "good enough" for this machine and proceeded to delete via Partition Magic the newly installed Linux partitions.

The Mistake

Here is where I goofed.  My plan was to first remove all the Linux partitions, then reboot into XP Pro, and then resize the C: and E: partitions back in XP to fill the disk.  I did that.  However, when rebooting into XP to do this, GRUB could no longer find the /boot folder (I think this what happened) and the machine would not boot into XP either!  Horrors!  Now what to do?

As reported on the Toshiba Technical Support form http://forums.compuserve.com/vlforums/default.asp?SRV=Toshiba&LOC=us&SEC=11&MSG=1499878, I made first-use of the CD Recovery disks that came with the Toshiba 1135. All worked, except that the recovery disks didn't overwrite the Master Boot Record; hence the flaw with GRUB did not get fixed first time around.  I consider that to be a flaw with the Toshiba recovery disks, and reported it as such to Toshiba Technical Support.  To resolve this problem, I made a fresh install of XP Pro to put on a working XP Master Boot Record, then re-applied the recovery disks (so to get the Toshiba software).  Then I upgraded XP Home to XP Pro and reinstalled the my own software. 

Conclusions

I currently do not recommend the combination of Red Hat Linux 9 on the Toshiba 1135.  I like each product individually.  I will probably try again after gathering a bit more information.

After my trial, far as I can tell, all is now working fine on the Toshiba 1135 laptop with Windows XP Professional. I was hoping it would be dual-boot into Linux, but that didn't work.  Disappointing.  Guess will have to wait for some time in future when I get a new laptop and for that I will do a little more research to ensure to get one that I expect to work.  I have desktop machine running Linux which I now can use directly, or via network from the Toshiba laptop.

I will continue to seek others' experience with installing Linux, in particular Red Hat, on the Toshiba 1135 laptop.  The two major issues for me to not recommend Linux on a Toshiba 1135 are:

  1. excessive noise of the hard disk,  and
  2. low screen resolution. 

I don't really understand why the disk performed differently with Linux than with XP.  I do think, however, that with some technical specification information from Toshiba or others for the monitor/LCD screen will enable the Linux screen resolution problem to be resolved.

New References Found after Attempt

  • http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de/main/  "Toshiba only supports officially Microsoft operating systems at this time. These pages are for users who want to find out more about Unix and Unix-like Open-Source based operating systems such as NetBSD and Linux. Therefore we will do our best to see if we can guide you to the proper forums and News groups for Linux, NetBSD and Unix in general"
  • Intel Support for Intel® 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller, including downloadable device drivers for SuSE and Red Hat.  See http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intel852gm.  Instructions for downloading and installing the driver software for Linux are published at http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/linux/graphics.htm
  • At http://www.columbia.edu/~gk297/toshiba.html G. Kossinets of Columbia University writes about his successful installation.  I was interested to note his comments about the noise of the hard disk; something I also noticed (and was alarmed about).  He provides a lot of technical information which I believe will be useful when I get around to re-trying to get Linux onto this laptop. (6-Oct-03).

 

R.M. Schneider