Linux on the Toshiba Portege R500: Updates

I’ve updated my article running openSUSE 10.3 on a Toshiba Portege R500.

New stuff:

• Fingerprint reader working.
• Bluetooth working.
• Docking station.
• External display, DVI, Xinerama/ Dual Head.

Acer Travelmate 4002: Optisches Laufwerk tauschen

Das DVD Laufwerk meines Toshiba P10 fiel kurz nach Ablauf der Garantiezeit aus. Der Austausch durch eine neues ging dabei recht einfach, da nur eine leicht zugängliche Schraube auf der Gehäuse-Unterseite gelöst werden musste. Bei dem Travelmate 4002 sah die Sache schon anders aus. Die einzige Schraube war gut versteckt. Das war besonders nervend, da alle anderen austauschbaren Komponenten leicht hinter entsprechend markierten Abdeckungen zugänglich waren.

Allgemeines zu optischen Laufwerken in Notebooks

Die optischen Laufwerke sind normiert und sollten sich problemlos durch ein beliebiges Ersatzgerät austauschen lassen. Aufpassen muss man bei ganz neuen Subnotebooks, die einen neuen Formfaktor mitbringen oder exotischen Notebooks, die eine eigene Firmware für die Laufwerke benötigen. Eine kurze Internetrecherche sollte da Klarheit verschaffen. Benutzt man es nicht täglich und hat keine besondere Anforderungen an Geschwindigkeit und Lautstärke, kann man ruhig das billigste Modell kaufen (im Moment so um die 50 Euro). Händler verstecken die Notebook-Modelle gern bei den Desktop-Laufwerken. Hier hilft es dann nach dem Begriff “slim” oder “slimline” zu suchen oder zu fragen.

Das Laufwerk wird in der Regel in einem Notebook-abhängigen Rahmen fixiert und mit einer einzigen Schraube im Gehäuse befestigt. Diese Schraube befindet sich mittig auf der der Laufwerksschublade gegenüberliegenden Seite. Die ganze Kunst besteht nun darin dieses Schräubchen zu finden…

Das Travelmate

Die folgende Anleitung sollte für alle Acer Travelmate 4000 Modelle, die das gleiche Gehäuse benutzen funktionieren…

Als Werkzeug wird nur ein Kreuzschlitz-Schraubendreher benötigt. Die zu lösenden Schrauben besitzen unterschiedliche Längen. Ihr solltet euch also die ursprüngliche Position gut merken!

Bevor ihr anfangt, unbedingt den Akku entfernen und die Hände an der Heizung erden!

Zunächst müssen die drei Schrauben an den Displayscharnieren gelöst werden.

Danach das Display bis zum Anschlag überstrecken und die obere Gehäuseschale ablösen. Da diese festgeklippt ist, muss man u.U. sanfte Gewalt anwenden.

Zwei Schrauben befestigen das Keyboard am Gehäuse. Diese lösen…

…und das Keyboard vorsichtig nach vorne klappen.

Nun liegt die Laufwerks-Schraube frei und kann entfernt werden.

Das Keyboard vorsichtig zurückklappen und den Displaydeckel schließen. Zum Schutz des Displays noch ein Tuch oder Stück Papier zwischen Tastatur und Bildschirm legen.

Nun das Notebook umdrehen und das Laufwerk aus dem Gehäuse entfernen. Das alte Laufwerk aus seinem Fixierrahmen entfernen und das neue Laufwerk einsetzen. Die obigen Schritte in umgekehrter Reihenfolge rückgängig machen. Fertig!

Wenn möglich und gewünscht können auch die Laufwerksblenden ausgetauscht werden um das Gehäusedesign nicht zu “stören”. Bei vielen Laufwerken sind diese einfach nur angeklippt und können vorsichtig entfernt werden.

Und vielen Dank an die Hand auf den Fotos für die gute Zusammenarbeit 😉

Echo Indigo with Opensuse 10.3

My old onboard sound (AC’97) was so crappy, that it didn’t even know the difference between silence and white noise. The onboard sound of my new notebook (Intel HDA (Realtek ALC262 chipset)) manages this quite well, but this time it doesn’t know the difference between music and white noise… To redeem the poor onboard chip, I replaced it by an Echo Indigo. Ugly, only two analog 1/8″ outputs but one hell of a soundcard! The best way to power a good headphone with a laptop.

Ok, back to topic.

Install “alsa-firmware”. Optionally “alsa-tools-gui”, if you want the original “echomixer” which could easily be replaced by kmix or similar in the everyday life. Restart alsa (Best way: Log out from your desktop env. Switch to console via Ctrl+Alt+F1. Log in as root. Then “init 1” followed by “init 5”. Possibly switch back with Ctrl+Alt+F7.). Plug in the card. The blue LED should begin to gleam.

Now you are able to control the onboard sound and the Indigo via KMix (never tried Gnome).

Btw.: Took me several hours in my Gentoo days to achieve this due to a bug in the baselayout…

Amarok

I’m using the Indigo exclusively to listen to music. For the rest, the onboard sound is enough. Choose xine as the audio output module and select “Alsa” manually. Now replace “default” in the mono and stereo field with “hw:1,0”. That will divert the amarok sound to the Indigo. That’s the hack I used with gentoo. I’m sure there’s a more elegant, modern way. But hey, it works!

Marginally noted, in the good old days xmms could detect the second sound card automatically. The amarok developers are denying this fact strongly in their IRC channel. (“Blahh, that’s not possible! Never heard of it! Shut up!” etc. etc.) Perhaps, when I will have some spare time I will look after that feature (read: never… 😦 ).

Opensuse 10.3 on Toshiba Portege R500

Some notes on installing Opensuse 10.3 on a Toshiba Portege R500.

Installation
First, use F2 and F3 to select your language and screen resolution. I prefer a resolution of 1024*768 to get a nice loading splash screen later. 1280×800 results in slighty sharper fonts but no loading splash screen.
At the end of the installation you have to set the X resolution to 1280×800, 12.2 inches and 1280×800@60Hz (monitor).

Suspend
As root: echo ‘S2RAM_OPTS=”-f” ‘ >> /etc/pm/config.d/suspend.conf
If you experience problems with your framebuffer, you can try “-f -a 3”.
See:
http://en.opensuse.org/Pm-utils

http://en.opensuse.org/S2ram

Volume control
KMix is confused by the volume wheel on the lower left side oft chasis. Quit KMix and add the mini program for volume control to the kicker panel. Configure the global shortcut with the volume wheel and Fn+Esc as the mute button. Set the “Front” channel to 100% since the applet is only able to control the PCM channel.

Brightness control
Open the /etc/sysconfig editor in yast to edit the key /etc/sysconfig/kernel/MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT . Add the module “toshiba_acpi”. After a reboot, brightness control via Fn+F6/F7 and kpowersave should work.

Fingerprint Reader

In my model, there’s an AuthenTec AES1610 fingerprint reader integrated. It’s connected via USB internally and there’s a userland driver available (you need no special kernel module)! Use ‘lsub’ and check the ID, if it’s the same device ( Mine: ‘Bus 002 Device 005: ID 08ff:1600 AuthenTec, Inc.’).

Install the latest version of libfprint, fprint_demo, pam_fprint (via 1-click install; see the openSUSE build service).

As root:

Start ‘fprint_demo’ to check, if it’s working. Faster wipes cause better scans.

Played enough? Go to /root and delete ‘.fprint’. Now use fprint_demo to register the finger you want to use for authentication, close fprint_demo and copy ‘.fprint’ to your users home directory. You can use two different fingers (read ‘.fprint’) for root and your user. Delete .fprint in your root home, if you do not want to authenticate as root via the finger print reader. You can do the same via “pam_fprint_enroll”, but with no visual control.

Now, let’s configure PAM. Edit /etc/pam.d/common-auth:

auth required pam_env.so
auth required pam_unix2.so
auth sufficient pam_fprint.so

Insert the bold line.

That’s it. Fingerprint authentication now should work in every app, that uses PAM. I’ve tested ‘su’ and ‘sudo’, the kdm login manager, kdesu (yast etc.) and the screensaver lock (in kde). Works as good as in Windows, at least… (This bundled authentication software is a pile of sh…!)

Read the security notes!

Docking station

Hot docking and undocking works. The “undock button” on the docking station is recognized as an acpi event and shuts down all subsystems attached to the docking station (usb, dvi etc.).

Sometimes, the above said things are not true. All hail to the ACPI god…

External display

Beamer via vga works. Widescreen display (1680×1050) via DVI works. Xinerama/ Dual Head works. Use xrandr or better krandtray to manipulate the X server. For Xinerama add “Virtual desiredX desiredY” to the subsection “Display” in your xorg.conf and use something like “xrandr –auto –output TMDS-1 –right-of LVDS” to activate Xinerama. Make sure, that you use the new ‘intel’ driver. The old ‘i810’ is not able to do that stuff so easily.

There are some problems with DRI and the ‘intel’ driver: XVideo is juddering with DRI turned on. I’ve also problems with Xinerama and DRI. The juddering problem is gone with the “i810”, but the other cool stuff is also gone (rotating, independent resolution control etc.).

Edit: I’ve just recognized, that xinerama is the old X extension to do dual head and xrandr is the new way. So replace Xinerama by dual head 😉

Bluetooth

The bluetooth module is turned off by default and has to be activated on demand. There are patches flying around to enable the toshiba_acpi module to do this (Here is the latest by Jonathan McDowell, which was rejected -> “Toshiba Bluetooth – Rejected since 1995™“).

One way to activate it in Linux is to use the “toshset” utility with proper kernel patches. In Ubuntu, something like “toshset -bluetooth on” will do the job. Unfortunately, that’s not working in openSUSE 10.3 . The easiest way for us is to use the great script from 0bits.com .

• Install the kernel-source
• Download toshbt.tar.gz
• As root: extract it, type “make” and “make install”. We have a new bluetooth enabler module now: toshbt
• Load the new module: modprobe toshbt

In the same moment you load the module, kbluetooth should start (asuming you are using KDE) and you can begin to play with your new bluetooth thingy. You can load the module automatically at boot (see “Brightness control”).
Not working

• Turning off the lcd backlight is not working, i.e. you can turn off BOTH the backlight and the LCD, but not the backlight alone to use the transflexive ability of the screen. Perhaps, there’s a way with toshset (which is not working in openSUSE 10.3) to achieve this.
• SD-Card reader not working. Strangely, it is detected in Knoppix. But not further investigated yet.
• Firewire not tried. (It worked on my Toshiba P10, so I see no problems there…)

Overall, this notebook is a great linux machine.

Other sites:
R500 Wifi and ACPI
Review of the new Toshiba Portege R500
R500 Fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth, and Volume Control
First impressions
Toshiba-Portege-R500-10N-sous (It’s in french, but bash is a universal language 😉 )

Changelog:

10th Feb 2008: added Docking Station, External Display and Fingerprint Reader

12th Feb 2008: added Bluetooth