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 This is an essay on about my installation of the Debian Linux operating system on a Toshiba m200 portage tablet laptop. At the time of the original writing, the Debian stable release was Lenny .
Note: Tested with version 5.0 stable (Lenny) and version 6.0 stable (Squeeze). Has not been tried with version 7.0 Testing (Wheezy).
I thought it was a good deal on an older Toshiba tablet computer and I had always wanted one, a tablet PC that is. Normally I don’t impulse buy, but there it was sitting on the table right there in front of me, running Windows XP for tablets. I have had good luck with Toshiba laptops in the past. However, there are a few issues with this one, which I probably would have discovered with a little up front research. Not that I am knocking the hardware. As expected, Toshiba hardware is very good. The fault is in the basic design. In this case no standard removable media drive and no ability to boot from a USB device.
Of course I did plan to dump Windows XP in favor of Debian Lenny, and did note the absence of a optical drive. But I made the mistaken assumption that it should be possible to boot from a USB or PCMCIA device. Was I ever wrong! There were a few devices recommended by Toshiba, but they were either too expensive or not available. Still there was a bright spot on the horizon, so to speak.
The Toshiba m200 has a SD card slot. Built into the laptop is the ability to recognize a specific file on a SD RAM card as a bootable DOS drive A. The file name is;
$tosfd00.vfd
Don't get your hopes up as it does not recognize any other files as floppy drives. This file has a maximum size of 2.88 MB, and also has some specific formatting requirements. Said drive is not big enough to hold any of the Debian Lenny default installers. While it would be possible for one to build a custom kernel and install scripts, there is an easier way.
My research indicated there were two primary methods to get Linux on this laptop. The prevailing wisdom was to use the PXE capabilities of the installed network interface and a tftp server on the local area network for the initial load. There are a couple of really small (floppy size) images that make use of this specific methodology. My understanding is that the image, when run, loads a striped down Kernel that turns on the wired adapter and looks for a specified tftp server to do the actual load from. This seems somewhat complicated and overly confusing to me. It also requires another computer with, what I consider, non standard programs.
Another method was to create multiple floppy images from a set of boot floppies (the old Etch stable release, as Lenny stable release does not have any boot floppy images). The trick is to use multiple SD cards, each with one floppy image. The number will depend on the number of installation floppies in a particular distribution. A variation on this method is to have another computer handy to change the image on one SD. That is boot, and when the next floppy is required pull the card and change to the next image, renaming it to “$tosfd00.vsd” then plugging it back in.
Neither of these methodologies met my needs, nor seemed particularly practical. So I chose to do an internet install using the below third option which could technically be done from one 16 MB SD card (8 MB being to small). What is interesting about the SD RAM card and the floppy image file, and is actually useful, is that the rest of the SD card is recognized as a non bootable psudo C drive. My size calculation is as follows;
DOS Boot Image 1.440 MB
Linux Install Kernel 1.390 MB
Initial Ram Disk image 5.610 MB
Loadlin Program 0.038 MB
Total Size 8.478 MB
I used a 256 MB card, as it was the smallest one I had. It might be hard to find smaller SD ram cards now days and I don’t know how big a card will work. The maximum size of a FAT16 partition is around 4 GB, which suggests a maximum size. However, I have not tried it with anything bigger than 256 MB.
Below is an outline of the process I used to do an INTERNET install:
Find or create a windows DOS/WIN95/WIN98 boot floppy. Several images are available on line. This can be done from any windows box with a floppy drive (This could possibly be a problem, as many computers don’t even bother with floppies anymore).
Create an image of the boot floppy. There are a few different programs to do this under Windows. I, on the other hand, inserted the floppy into my Linux box and used the dd command;
$ dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~/$tosfd00.vfd
Note there are some boot floppy images available on the INTERNET that can be used “as is”.
Copy the boot image over to the root directory of the SD ram card.
From the Debian Lenny (or Squeeze) Install CD, in the tools directory, copy the “loadlin" executable over to the SD ram card.
Search the Debain FTP site (or one of its mirrors) and locate the Lenny (Squeeze) net install kernel and initial ram disk, then copy them to the SD ram card. When I did this they were called “linux” and “initrd.gz” respectively. I found them here;
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-
i386/20090123lenny1/images/netboot/
For Debian Squeeze, the files are found at;
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/squeeze/main/installer-
i386/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/
The pesudo C drive on the flash card should now contain three programs; loadlin, the kernal image and the ram disk image.
Insert the SD card into the Toshiba m200, and connect it to your network, so it has access to the INTERNET. Better to use wired, as the wireless network adapter is hard to get up and running during the initial install.
Start up the Toshiba m200. Press the F12 key as it boots. This lets you use the arrow keys to select a boot device. There are a row of pictures across the bottom of the screen. The one that looks like a SD card over a floppy is the correct icon. Arrow over to select it, and hit the enter key. This will boot you into whatever DOS version your boot floppy was.
Issue a “C:” command to move over to the pseudo C directory on the rest of the SD card. At the C prompt, type the following command;
Loadlin linux initrd=initrd.gz vga=788
The “vga=788” is a boot parameter passed to the kernel so the screen is readable. There are other parameters that can also be passed, but they are not needed and beyond the scope of this document.
You will see a lot of dots flow across the screen as the kernel and ram disk load. The wired Ethernet card will be recognized, and you will be at the language selection screen of a net install. Everything else from here forward is normal, except that all components will be downloaded from the INTERNET once an FTP site is selected.
I finished up doing a base Debian Lenny install. At the TASKSEL step I included “Laptop” and “Standard”, but deselected “Desktop”.
When selected, the default desktop is a fairly complete installation of Gnome. I am planning on using KDE instead. When I upgrade to Squeeze, I will have to look at the laptop resources and might go with a lighter desktop like XFCE4 or LXDE.
Once the install was done, I restarted the laptop and modified the sources.list file to include “contrib” and “non-free” repositories. I used the VI editor to modify and clean up the file, but you can use whatever you wish.
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main
deb-src http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main
I ran aptitude and did a package list update by pressing "u" on the keyboard. I followed this up with "Shift U" to update any installed packages to the newest versions.
The wireless network is an Intel ipw2200 pci card. Both the firmware and drivers for this card are available in Lenny. The driver module is part of the standard kernel, and the firmware is available in the non-free repository.
Retrieve the firmware package using what ever method you prefer; apt-get, aptitude or dpkg.
The laptop has an NIVIDA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card. The default nv drivers can be used for this. However, to get better functionality from the tablet, I would suggest installing the 173.14.xx NVIDIA drivers from the non-free repository.
I am at a point now where I can install a GUI and work on getting some of the other features to work, like the tablet touch screen. I may write about this exercise in a different post. But otherwise the laptop runs great under Debian Lenny. Some items just do not work, like the SDRAM slot under Linux. Proprietary Toshiba drivers seem to be the reason for this. And I have yet to test the blue tooth.
If this post helped you, or you found other ways to load Linux on the m200, please leave a comment. |
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