Qtrac Ltd.

Linux on a UK Toshiba Equium A110-233 Laptop

Summary: Kubuntu works fine, but Fedora doesn't.

Updated 2008-05-24.

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General The computer comes with Windows XP Home pre-installed. Another computer was used to download and burn an ISO image of the Linux SystemRescueCd. The laptop was then booted with this CD (and by pressing F12 to get the choice of boot media and choosing the CD/DVD drive). QParted was then used to non-destructively halve the size of the NTFS partition to leave room for Linux.

Kubuntu 8.04 LTS (KDE 3.5) This installs perfectly from CD recognises all the hardware and seems to work fine, including the sound card, wired and wireless networking, and both USB and SD memory. (Untested: burning CDs/DVDs and firewire.) This is what I'm using every day when I'm not using my Fedora-based desktop system.

Xubuntu 8.04 LTS This installs perfectly from CD recognises all the hardware and seems to work fine. (Untested: burning CDs/DVDs, the sound card, wireless networking, firewire, SD memory card reader.)

Kubuntu 6.06 LTS This installs perfectly from CD and recognises the 1280x800 screen, the USB port (for memory sticks), and the Realtek RTL8139/810x Ethernet card. The machine can read CDs and DVDs with no problems. No manual configuration was required for the items mentioned. Untested: burning CDs/DVDs, the sound card, wireless networking, firewire, SD memory card reader. Note that Kubuntu installs a 386-processor kernel so for best performance you will need to install a "686" kernel–this can easily be achieved using apt-get or the Adept package manager.

Fedora 8 & 9 Both appear to work, the only odd thing being that after installing from the Live CD you have to switch off to reboot. Then you get into the second phase of the installation and that appears to work. I tried both the standard GNOME spin and the KDE spin and for both the system just doesn't work! It works fine (but slowly) as a live system, but just doesn't work reliably (or even boot properly) from the hard disk. I don't have time to investigate, and anyway the machine is "old" by today's standards, so I'm staying with *ubuntu which works fine on it.

Fedora 7 This installs perfectly from the live CD and recognises the 1280x800 screen and the Ethernet card. I haven't tried anything else since I can't change OSs on the machine at the moment.

Fedora Core 5 & 6 These install perfectly from CD or DVD and recognise the 1280x800 screen and the USB port (for memory sticks), but no matter what was tried (including kernels 2.6.15, 2.6.17, and also 2.6.18 from testing) it would not recognise the Ethernet card. The machine can read CDs and DVDs with no problems. No manual configuration was required for the items mentioned. Untested: writing CDs and DVDs, the sound card, wireless networking, firewire, SD memory card reader. Not working: networking.

OpenSUSE 10.1 This LiveDVD did not work: it could not handle the screen, so X could not run, and it depends on X.

Additional Information
According to Darren Salt:
The SD card reader requires a kernel < 2.6.18 or >= 2.6.20.2; the fix is also in 2.6.21-rc1. (A voltage-handling change broke it in 2.6.18-rc1.) The Ethernet interface (RTL8101e) works with Realtek's r1000 driver (but a soft lockup will occur if no cable is plugged in when the driver is loaded), or with r8169 in 2.6.20. I've found no problems burning CDs or DVDs, the few times I've tried.