James Shepherd

Gentoo Linux Toshiba Tecra A2

(2006/02/05)

There are a couple of things to get right if you want to get everything working great on the Toshiba Tecra A2. The only thing that doesn't work for me at the moment is the framebuffer for a higher resolution on the text console.

Here are some salient details of the installation:

Kernel
  • Make sure you compile the AC97 sound drivers as modules
  • Also, the ipw2200 network driver needs to be a module (so there is a filesystem mounted to load the firmware)
/usr/src/linux-2.6.15-gentoo-r1/.config
Xorg

X works nicely, including the touchpad scrolling.

/etc/X11/xorg.config

Finishing up base Installation
  • emerge alsa-utils
  • emerge ipw2200-firmware
  • emerge pciutils
  • emerge wireless-tools
  • emerge acpi
  • emerge pcmcia-tools
gnome

When you emerge gnome put the following in /etc/portage/package.use:

x11-misc/xscreensaver new-login
x11-base/xorg-x11 input_devices_synaptics


This will give you the Xorg "synaptics" module for the touchpad scrolling, and also compile xscreensaver with support for logging in on top of someone's session when the screensaver is on.

Whenever I emerge gnome for the first time on a system, it always stalls on pango or/and cairo. Dunno why. Easy to fix though. Just:
  • emerge - - unmerge pango (or cairo)
  • emerge - - deep - - update gnome
You could just emerge the offending package, but then you end up with it in world.

LCD Brightness

You can read the current brightness level with the command:
  • cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness
This also tells you the levels you can set. To set a level, do something like:
  • echo 40 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness