anyone ever managed to boot Puppy on a Toshiba laptop?

[octathlon]

I have an almost new Toshiba Satellite M-series laptop, 1.6 GHz, 512MB RAM, etc. and Puppy hangs on boot, something related to the PCMCIA port. I posted about it on the beginner's forum and someone suggested using boot parameter 'nopcmcia' (see the thread there if interested in the details "Can't boot Puppy on my laptop - hangs").

I see no evidence in the documentation or in my experimentation that such boot parameters are even recognized - I tried several and they seem to be completely ignored -- but anyway nothing like that worked and I haven't been able to get puppy started.

After searching through the forums here, my question is: has anyone actually managed to boot up Puppy on a Toshiba laptop? I see that some people have on IBM Thinkpads. Also, is anyone interested in resolving the pcmcia problem so that beginners like me will be able to use Puppy on their laptops? Has anyone experimented with Puppy on various laptops other than the Thinkpad?

thanks

[Lobster]

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/LaptopsWorking

[octathlon]

Thanks for responding That's encouraging, there are several Toshibas listed, though no Satellites.

I have searched for hours trying to find something to tell me what I need to do to be able to get Puppy to boot up, to no avail. This is my last cry for help, then I will give up.

I'm curious to at least get an answer as to whether it is possible to include other boot parameters when entering the option 1-4 when booting. If not, I don't want to waste any more time trying different things and rebooting over and over like an idiot.

[muggins]

octathlon,

i've got a satellite 1730cdt & puppy boots without any problems. the 1730cdt has 2 pcmcia slots, but whether pup recognises them i can't say as i don't use them.

are you certain the iso downloaded &/or burned correctly?

[octathlon]

Hi muggins,

Yes the ISO is good; I used it to boot Puppy on a Dell desktop and even on an old P100 with only 48MB RAM.

I don't use the PCMCIA either, so finding a way to get Puppy to ignore it would be good. I wonder what could be the difference between my machine and yours? In the other thread I posted the messages I got when it hung. Thanks for the info.

[cthisbear]

In early March I installed my sisters' new laptop with 2 partitions and backed it up to DVD. - Toshiba Satellite 1.73 Centrino 512 Ram.

I knew Puppy 1.08 would work because my local computer dealer

was knocked out because in under 5 minutes he was on the internet
after I told him how to set up a similar laptop.
So this particular Toshiba definetly works. I have had problems with earlier
Toshiba laptops, especially the old chestnut of it askng for a password.
Try Puppy2 alpha4 release, this may work.

And generally speaking if I set up a new DESKTOP for someone I always use
Gigabyte motherboards because they work with Puppy, even the cheapest.

[muggins]

octathlon,

another resource for toshiba linux users is:

http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de/main/index.html

you can plug in your model and see what successes, and failures, others have had.

e.g. with a quick browse i saw this for a satellite M50:


To install a fresh Linux, turn pcmcia off to boot
(enter the kernelflag
nopcmcia=yes).
After installing PCMCIA edit the file
/etc/pcmcia/config.opts

Change this line:
include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0x800-0x8ff, port
0xc00-0xcff

to this one:
include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0xc00-0xcff

Afterwards the kernelflag nopcmcia=yes is not
needed any more.



maybe there could be something on this site of use for you?

[octathlon]

Thanks muggins, I'm sure you're right! The only problem is, HOW do I set that boot parameter? Apparently Puppy doesn't accept them. I tried all kinds of things: nopcmcia, nopcmcia=yes, etc. etc. but Puppy seems to ignore them.

If anyone knows HOW to apply these parameters to Puppy, please let me know!

[tempestuous]

Yes, I think you're right. I can successfully add various boot options at the Puppy boot prompt, but not to disable PCMCIA. I think this may be a failing of the boot script, which should probably check for the presence of "nopcmcia" before launching PCMCIA setup routines.

A solution would be to create a remastered version of Puppy with the correct /etc/pcmcia/config.opts.

[TreeMan]

I'm using puppy on a Satellite 1735. I have only had it on for about a week now. My pcmcia works fine. But I have not been able to figure out how to get 3COM 3c95x to save and load on boot. I'm still working on sound...lol Everything else is great.

I have played with Linux a little over the last few years but still concider myself a noob. I still have RedHat on my Satellite but it is too complicated for me. That is why I'm using Puppy now.

[xrisward]

Puppy 1.8 installed without incident here. This is a 466 MHz, 192 MB machine. Everything is quick: bootup in 30 seconds, shutdown in <5 seconds, and apps launch in <2 seconds.

I'm using PCMCIA to run an SMC2635w wireless card. This took a little patience to get working, but it's now working great.

[Nathan F]

I recently acquired an older Toshiba, a Satellite 2060. It has the problems mentioned with pcmcia, and with irq conflicts. And passing 'nopcmcia' to the kernel does not work since some pcmcia is hard coded into the bootup. I have made some progress, though.

I first got it to boot all the way up by passing 'pci=off' to the kernel, but obviously that puts you in a very limited run mode. I got the full gui, but no sound or usb, and probably a few other things missing as well.

I then started remastering and came up with an iso that doesn't load pcmcia support at all, which is now running fairly well for me. I have sound and usb now, but as of yet no networking. This laptop has no built in nic so I had been using a usb to ethernet adaptor, which works under Windows obviously, and also works under DSL (again with pcmcia disabled in order to bootup all the way). I can't figure out how to get Puppy to recognize it as a network device, though. It sees it, and I can load the pegasus module just fine (which is just my best guess as to the appropriate one, based on some googling), but no joy on connecting with it.

When we put out the community based 109 release I can maybe provide my remaster for a few others who have this problem to test. From what I've read Toshiba SAtellites are one of the hardest laptops to get working all the way under Linux so it might be nice to have at least some limited support in Puppy.

Nathan

[Nathan F]

Ha! Network is up and running now. I was using the wrong module, it should have been rtl8150.

Once I'm happy with how this is all running I'll add some info to the wiki about it. I don't know how much will apply to users of other Toshibas but my guess is that almost all of it will apply at least to Satellite users.

Nathan