[rescue] Ubuntu on Toshiba R100 [was: Ultra 5 OS]

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Saith Of Brendan Shanks ...
> On Apr 19, 2010, at 3:33 PM, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> 
> > I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Toshiba Portege 
> > R-100, itself 
> > an amusing undertaking since you have to boot from both 
> > PCMCIA and USB 
> > at the same time.  Once I installed UNR, the screen display 
> > was about half-size.
> > Extensive Googling led me to a page that included an xorg.conf that 
> > fixed the problem after some additional fiddling.  The WiFi 
> > was flake 
> > city, even after much Googling found some suggested driver 
> > substitutions.  No driver for the SD card slot at all.  
> > Yada, as they say, yada yada.
> 
> (sorry to take this even farther off topic, but...) I have 
> Ubuntu 9.10 running on my Portege R100, and it works quite 
> well. I installed over netboot (a few versions ago, probably 
> 8.04), the display works good (although you need a vga= 
> kernel cmdline param to keep it in 1024x768 all the time), 
> and the Intel 802.11b WiFi works great (much better than in 
> Windows). Haven't found an SD card driver though.

I'm 3000 miles from my R-100 at the mo', but I may have some questions for
you when I get back home.

However ... I PXE-booted the R-100 from an Ubuntu LTSP server, which was OK
except for the video, but LTSP doesn't seem to provide an installation
choice.  I didn't pursue that further, once I figured out that having the
same boot image on a PCMCIA device and a USB device would allow you to boot
Linux.  The R-100 won't boot from USB.  You can't boot Linux off PCMCIA
alone because it doesn't have PCMCIA drivers in the kernel; once the kernel
takes over from the hardware, it can't find the rest of its stuff.  So, you
add a USB key with the same boot image, and it uses that once it starts up
from PCMCIA.

I had an Atheros WiFi card, which was OK under XP, but flake city under
Ubuntu.  I replaced it with an Intel, which works great.

I understand that Toshiba has never released any information on th SD card
slot, hence no Linux drivers.

My R-100 now is rather slick.  I replaced the HD with a CF card and adapter,
and have a "frugal" Puppy Linux installation.  It boots in less than 30
seconds, loads everything into RAM, and runs from there.  It's really fast.

Unfortunately, Puppy is not as well-organized a distribution as Ubuntu; lots
of the packages are somewhat elderly, and, because there's no good
depository system, finding new ones can be difficult.  Still, for what I use
it for (web, mail, ssh), and when I use it (when I don't want to take the
"big" laptop), it works great.  The R-100 is a terrific little computer.

-Shel