 A Really Useful Page At Last ?
I've got quite a few pages describing installing Linux on one or the other of my laptops now but they are all either crap failures or else too easy. This one is different because I've actually managed to do something quite tricky which might be of some help to someone (albeit some very geeky someone!)
What's a Toshiba T3600CT?
Some kinda ancient Portege thingy. Here is what I wrote about the T3600CT when I first set about experimenting with Linux:
The Toshiba T3600CT is a laptop based on a Intel 80486 processor.
It dates back to the early Neanderthal period, when Intel engineers
clad only in rough animal skins chiseled machine code into limestone
tablets. As a result, it is exceptionally hard to find out any information
about it on the web. You can't, for example, get hold of a manual
without sending £25 to Toshiba. Curiously enough, though,
I did find
a page which related pretty directly to what I was trying
to do.
Here are some other pages relevant to the T3600CT - BIOS
update (sorry - I can't link directly, but click on this link,
then select 'archive' from the drop down box, then old t-series>t36xx>t3600ct
- alternatively, try this
direct link but I can't guarantee it will work. By the way,
I found the instructions in the zip file didn't seem to apply to
the T3600CT, but you can force it to install by booting from a windows
bootdisk (I used the Windows
95 disk from here and typing CHGBIOS at the command line, and
then entering BOOTBIOS.COM at the prompt. That seems to do the job
nicely : : : Video
driver for Windows 3.1: : : Update the BIOS to be Y2K compatible
using the tosh.exe
file (You have to scroll down to get to the appropriate section
and you can download the upgrade there too) : : : How to install
new memory modules on the laptop. If you want to check the BIOS
setup, you use [ESC] not [DEL], as is more common. Press F1 when
it tells you to and you're there. Another page about the T3600CT but not tremendously informative...
What's a Net-Install?
Debian Linux gives the opportunity of setting up a very, very minimal base system and using that as a platform to get the rest of the packages you want over the net instead of burning them all to CD. Full details are on the Debian install pages. Basically, it's very useful because the T3600CT doesn't have a CD drive and all you need to do this is four spare floppies (5 if you want to make a boot disk) and a PCMCIA network card (or modem if you have a lot of time on your hands).
 PCMCIA
I have 3 PCMCIA network adapters and I tried each in turn. Firstly, the Belkin 16-bit Notebook Network Card F5D5020 lit up merrily and then (just to spite me, I'm sure) failed to work, even though it is specifically listed as supported by the Debian documentation (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/pcmcia.html) and the 3Com 3CCFE575CT-D, which is not listed but which is very similar to several other 3com models which are, just didn't work at all, but perhaps I should have expected that. However, it doesn't matter because my slow old 3com gigalan card (which only does 10baseT! Oh the Humanity!) works just fine, so if you get the chance, get one of those... Otherwise, just take your chances!
Getting Started:
Got a bit of time on your hands? This whole thing is going to take you about 8 hours. If your network connection is slow, well... don't make any plans for the weekend...
First of all, you can get away with just the compact disk set. Click here to get the current location of these disks, or navigate from the net-install page if that's changed for some reason. You'll see that there are a huge array of versions for each of the packages. What you need are the ones ending containing "images-1.44/compact" in their urls. You should get the rescue disk, the root disk and two driver disks.
So (assuming nothing has changed, version-wise between me writing this in early 2005 and you reading it), that's:
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/compact/rescue.bin
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/compact/root.bin
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/compact/driver-1.bin and
http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/compact/driver-2.bin
You'll need to use rawrite to write these images to floppy. NB - You can not just transfer them to the floppy as you would with an ordinary file!!!
Once you have the 4 disks all set up and ready to go, insert the rescue disk and reboot the laptop. Just in case there's any doubt in your mind about what to happen, this process is going to install a whole new operating system on your computer. If windows is installed, Linux will not be a new program within Windows. Windows will simply be gone. If you're not happy with that, go and do something else instaed. this is not the page for you. Assuming your bios is configured to allow booting from floppy disks, you should see the Debian welcome screen. press enter to continue. After a while, you'll have to put the root disk in. You then go through a series of menus. If you haven't already partitioned your disk, do that now. I'm using the following partitions (and, again, I'm not saying these are the best options!)
hda1 : 5MB (Primary)
hda2 : 300MB (Primary)
hda5 : 50MB (Logical, marked as Swap (type 82))
hda6 : 400MB (Logical)
hda7 : 60MB (Logical)
The program that makes the partitions is cfdisk, which is a bit easier to use than fdisk. If you muff it up don't worry too much because nothing is set in stone until you select "write". You don't have to bother making anything bootable because you can do that later in the process.
The Base System:
Once you've done that, you'll be led through a series of menus relating to keyboard setup, etc. which is all self explanatory. The next big job is to allocate the disk partitions to various points on the filesystem. First, set up the swap partition (hda5 in this case), and then choose "initialize a linux partition" to set up the first linux partition - known as "/" ("root"). After this, the default option is to move on to other things, but you should scroll down to initialize another linux partion and keep going until all yoru partitions are mounted properly. I used hda1 as /boot, hda2 as /, hda6 as /usr and hda7 as /home.
More options follow. Remember that the default option offered to you is not always the best one to take, but at some point you will need to install the drivers, which will entail putting the rescue disk back in the drive followed by the two driver disks. You don't need to configure any additional drivers. When that's done, set up PCMCIA. You'll be asked whether the controller is Intel-based or databook. It's Intel. The other one doesn't work. If you're using the same PCMCIA card as me, you won't need to supply any additional arguments or anything, so skip the next three questions. Next, configure the host name and the network. Assuming your PCMCIA card is properly supported you should be told that eth0 (the main ethernet device) is a PCMCIA card. Fine. Once you're connected you can install the base system from the network. I found it quicker to change the default download location from http://www.us.debian.blahblah to ftp://ftp.uk.debian.blahblah. The transfer of files takes quite a long time and when you're done you'll need to make the system bootable and then reboot into it.
Additional Software:
When you reboot you will be asked more questions about your location, the time (My system clock says it is 1991...Hm...) and the passwords you'd like to use. Next comes the software installation. You'll have to be pretty ruthless because you hardly have any space at all to put this stuff into. First, you choose which large-scale packages you want using tasksel, and then you use dselect (which is incredibly fiddly) to choose individual packages. This is very long-winded and will drive you nuts, I promise.
On the first coupld of goes-around I overreached myself and the installation failed, but when I used the partitions described above it went OK. I even managed to download xfree86. Unfortunately (and to my great irritation, XFree86 version 4.x does not support the Western Digital chipset in this compy. Tch! Right... This is where it gets complicated...
The Long Dark Night of the Endless Scrolling Text.
Hours and hours elapse with Debian telling me my packages have all been sent from 370 million seconds in the future (the hardware clock is buggered). Occasionally, it asks for some input or else it stops for twenty minutes having a little think before starting again. It's riveting, I tell you!
When it's all done, you can log in or reboot or whatever and just check everything is tickety-boo. At this point, you have a perfectly acceptable Linux box which you can use for whatever but of course it doesn't have a GUI. Well, let's see what we can do about that...
Adjusting the Hardware Clock
By the way, I mentioned the clock was knackered... Well, there is a way of fixing this: What you have to do is use hwclock to set the hardware clock (NB: I used the --set --date option, but the instruction page seems to be slightly wrong in that it doesn't put quotation marks around the date string. What I typed was:
hwclock --set --date="01/05/2005 11:11:00"<enter>
followed by:
hwclock --hctosys <enter>
which sets the hardware clock and then synchs linux's system clock with the new value.
X-itement, Adventure and Really Wild Things.
The version of XFree86 that seems to work with the WD90C24A2 chipset is the 3.x version - an old, defunct version of X. You can download it from the XFree86 download server but bear in mind that you'll be using the text browser called Lynx (just type "Lynx" at the command line!) to download the packages, highlight them using the arrow keys and hit the <D> key. Run the preinst script first. It will probably tell you to get and install other things (In my case, ld.so, which I had to get from linux.org.uk. I had more luck installing the tarball than the .deb, though, oddly enough. Who'da thunk it?
Anyroadup, download all the tarballs and things (including the XSVGA.tgz and XVG16 tarballs from the "servers" directory) and follow the install guide in "RELNOTES". By this time, if you are new to Linux, you will be thinking fond thoughts of Bill Gates and wondering why anyone in their right mind would want to use anything other than Windows. Actually, it's not that bad though. All you need to do is run preinst.sh, followed by the extract tool and then postinst.sh. Ater that, configure it by running /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config. This page from Muppetlabs has some useful information about setting up XFree86 for the T3600CT including a complete config file with all the values for the various settings) Annoyingly enough, I had no luck getting X to work using the program so I had to edit it using vi (type vi /etc/XF86Config and use the annoyingly idiosyncratic vi command system to edit the file.)
X Configuration.
The setup routine is not too hard (well, it isn't if you crib off that excellent Muppetlabs page!) Oh and by the way, the chipset is number 812 in the database, just to save you a bit of scrolling! The other things that I found tricky were the server type (I chose option 3 - the SVGA 256 colour job), the amount of video memory (1024???) and Clockchip (press enter to skip!) Oh, and be careful pressing enter. I quite often found I'd skipped a section by accidentally pressing too hard.
Broken Stuff
In my experience, it's easy to screw this up. What worked for me - as far as X was concerned - was trimming out a lot of the fat. Theoretically, it ignores all the bits that don't work and picks the best screen resolution etc but I didn't find that was the case at all.
The pointy thing is a PS/2 mouse even though it doesn't look like one and it runs on /dev/psaux. I also have a microsoft two-button mouse (a "Busmouse", apparently) which I thought would work well once I'd enabled the serial port (/dev/ttyS0 or 1 - use ctrl-escape to get into bios to make sure it's enabled) but it didn't. Tch! The pointer is usable but very annoying. I think the problem is that when I went to build busmouse support into the kernel it found an irq conflict - presumably with the PS/2 pointer. Disconnecting the pointer isn't really an option!
Anyway, here's my XF68Config file in .txt format if you're interested. I've cut out most of the dross but I'm sure you could slim it down by another 40% or so if you were so inclined.
If you screwed up the language settings and your keyboard is all wrong, try typing "keytab-lilo /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty/uk.kmap.gz
Finally...
There are a whole load of lightweight window managers here if you're in the mood to experiment. some of them are pretty good fun; some of them are hell on toast! I tried to install IceWM window manager but there was quite a bit of package dependency and I started to run out of disk space so I just gave up.
Windowlab proved a little easier. To install it, just download it from the homepage , untar it and make it. you may like to edit menurc.sample first though to get rid of the programs it lists that aren't on your system. The format is Menu Entry:Command - So, for example, "Eyes:xeyes" would give you an entry "Eyes" on the menu, which, when clicked, would launch the xeyes application. When it's made and installed, create a file in your home directory (/home/username or /root) called .xinitrc and write this lot into it:
#! /bin/sh xrdb $HOME/.Xdefaults xsetroot -solid gray & xclock -g 60x50-0+0 -bw 0 & xterm -g 60X24+0+0 & xterm -g 60x24+0-0 & xconsole
exec windowlab
then just type xinit at the command line instead of startx. isn't it just great? ok, so it's not... but you're a geek and the pleasure of just making it work should be enough at this point!
Summary
It's worth pointing out in all this that - unlike Windows or even Fedora, nothing truly perplexing happened in the course of all this. I had to do a fair bit of research, but whenever the installation hit a brick wall it always gave clear indications of what I had to do. There were no unexplained freezes or anything. Despite the limited resources, debian chugged on like a fucken tank and nothing stood in its way.
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