Toshiba Satellite A200-237

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WARNING: Work in Progress!

I'm still working on exploring the possibilities of this notebook.

Installing Fedora 12

The notebook needed to go to Toshiba Repair three times. Two times it came back with all data intact. The third time they accidentally the whole disk.

So I decided to install Fedora 12. Instead of repeating the recovery procedure (see Installing Fedora9)

I dropped the D-partition and used the standalone version of gparted to shrink the Vista partition. The thus freed space was split between a small (1GB) boot partition, and a LVM partition.

I have the Fedora install files on a server on the LAN, so I booted the notebook with the Fedora 12 install kernel using PXE and ran the installe, after adjusting the repositories so that the newest versions of all packages would be available to the installer.

After reboot I installed the Tux on Ice enabled kernel. I did not chang grub.conf to boot this kernel with vga=791 since that doesn't seem to be necessary anymore. Reboot. Fedora 12 ready for production.

Processor	OK	Dynamic frequency switching can be seen on power applet
Display	OK	1280 x 800
CD/DVD R/RW	OK
Graphics	OK	No accellerated graphics
Touchpad	FAIL	Cursor movement, H/V scroll, not mouse clicks
USB	OK
Battery	OK	Percentage, estimated time
Ethernet	OK
Wireless	OK
Bluetooth	OK	See Notes
Hibernate (SwSusp)	OK
Hibernate (TuxOnIce)	OK
Suspend (to RAM)	OK
Sound	OK	Record and playback
VGA-Out		Not tested
S-Out		Not tested
Webcam	OK	I assume so. Repeair broke my webcam.
Fn keys	FAIL	See Notes
56k modem		Not tested
Firewire		Not tested
SD Card Reader	OK
PCI/Ex		Not tested

Notes:

The expected battery time is not available, only an estimate is given. This is also the case under Windows so it is probably not a Linux problem.
A fully charged battery lasts for about 90 minutes only on an lightly loaded system. This is very disappointing. Moreover, after four months this is already reduced to just over one hour.
The Touchpad, WiFi and Bluetooth must be enabled from Windows since the Fn keys cannot be used to control them!
Bluetooth can be enabled with help of the OmniBook kernel module.
As opposed to many other members of the Satellite A200 series this model has a Phoenix BIOS, and hence does not have Linux support for several specific Toshiba features like Fn keys. Some keys, however, work.
Mouse clicks (taps) on the TouchPad can be reenabled an several ways. Googling for “fedora touchpad tapping” will show some.