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FreeBSD on a Toshiba Satellite 1005-S157

This page describes my experiences installing FreeBSD on a Toshiba Satellite 1005-S157 series laptop. These procedures should work with models 1000-S157, 1000-S158 and 1005-158 which appear to only differ in the Software provided by Toshiba.

Preparation

You can repartition and reinstall Windows XP from the Toshiba supplied recovery disks. If you boot from the first CD and exit the recovery program you will be at a DOS prompt from which you can repartition and reformat your disk. I set my disk up with 50% of the space dedicated to Windows, 25% set aside for a spare partition (currently two FAT drives shared between Windows and FreeBSD, but previously I had Redhat 7.3 installed), and finally 25% for FreeBSD.

If you want you can boot from the FreeBSD installation CD (see notes below) and use the FreeBSD disk partitioning tools.

To install Windows XP from the recovery disk run C:\BASE\OS.BAT.

Very Important Notes:

• The Toshiba recovery CD default reinstallation always repartitions and reformats the entire disk. It does warn you before doing so.
• The OS.BAT script reformats the first partition it finds and installs Windows XP on it. I don't remember that it gives you any warning before destroying things. It also gives you no choice of partition and its definition of "first" seems a little complicated. On at least one occasion it picked the partition at the end of the disk and overwrote my FreeBSD installation.
• The OS.BAT script uses Ghost to restore partition information. You can probably run Ghost manually and restore the base install manually. I have not done this myself.

You should have space for FreeBSD now.

Install

To get past an ugly hang on boot, you need to follow some special procedures.

You can boot from the standard installation CDs if you disable probing of the eisa bus. To do this go into command line configuration and give the command "eisa 0". Once you have installed the OS, remove the "device eisa" from your kernel configuration, rebuild and reinstall the kernel.

Booting [kernel] in 10 seconds...
[press space key]
ok boot -c
[...boot messages...]
config> eisa 0
config> quit

The system should now boot up correctly. Don't forget to build and install a new kernel. See Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel for more information.

Booting

I installed the FreeBSD boot manager and dual-boot WinXP/FreeBSD works fine. I also was triple booting with Redhat Linux 7.3 until I got enough FreeBSD working that Linux was no longer of interest to me.

Display

The I830 chipset included on this laptop can be used in 1024x768 256 color mode with the Frame Buffer driver in XFree86 4.2.0. Although XFree86 4.2.0 has support for the I810/I830 chipset, I do have that working yet. I let X --configure generate a default configuration file for me and this I update the following lines:

        Driver      "vesa"

I am currently using /etc/X11/XF86Config.

Mouse

You'll need to patch your system to get the touchpad mouse working. I have a small patch to the psm driver available at psm.c.patch. Apply this patch to your kernel sources and rebuild your kernel. (Don't forget to re-apply this patch every time you cvsup the kernel tree.)

PCMCIA

Works out of the box.

Ethernet

This machine does not include any built in Ethernet. I have successfully used "Network Everywhere (Fast Ethernet 10/100 PC Card)" PCMCIA card with the ed driver.

Wireless

This machine does not include any built in Wireless. I have successfully used a Cisco Aironet 340 PCMCIA card with the an driver.

USB

USB seems to mostly work. It appears that this device only supports USB 1.1. To make all 3 USB ports work make sure you create the /dev/usb? devices. Its working well enough for my minor needs that I haven't looked further at it.

Modem

Does not work out of the box. I haven't looked at it very much at all, but I think the hardware only implements the DA and AD conversion process and all the other processing needs to be done in the CPU. I am thinking that it might be possible to hook up a phone line to the PC and build a custom answering machine program using the modem support. However, since I take this laptop with me when I travel I wouldn't be able to use this for my home phone line.

Audio

Mostly seems to work okay using the pcm driver. On occasion I have seen the sound not working correctly. Reseting the mixer setting would overcome this problem. I use the following command:

mixer `mixer -s`

This reads the current mixer settings and sets them back into the mixer. On occasion, I think two invocations of this command are necessary.

More recently, I have been using the mixer-1.0 port and have not noticed this problem. I may either remove this port or change it, I would rather see the setting reset to normalized values on boot than leaving them at whatever silly setting I was last using. This port also does not preserve the recording source over reboots.

I am often using professional audio input sources with this laptop. The line-in jack works fine and was one of the reasons I chose this laptop. Most recent laptops have not been including a line-in jack for some reason.

When connecting a microphone to the mic-in jack, I was finding recording level very low. I've created a kernel patch which enables a built in 20dB gain on the microphone channel. This patch is available at ac97.c.patch.

Infrared

This machine does not include any built in Infrared.

Problems

• APM doesn't work at all. You won't get any battery level indication, no use of SpeedStep, Hibernation or anything else. Hopefully ACPI support will work in the future.
• Memory is not cleared on a powerdown if power remains available. This means the the internal dmesg memory area continues to look valid on the next powerup sequence and dmesg will show the previous contents in addition to the current boot information. I setup a shutdown script which clears the message buffer area using the command:

  /sbin/sysctl kern.msgbuf_clear=1
  

Files

• dmesg.verbose
• pciconf.verbose
• kernel configuration
• ac97.c.patch
• psm.c.patch
• XF86Config

Last Comments

This information is current of January, 2003 using FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE.

I am of mixed feeling about this laptop:

• The price was very good ($799 after $200 in rebates and $100 in price drop a week later which Circuit City gave me with no problem).
• This was one of the few laptops available in early 2002 which still had a line-in jack.
• The initial FreeBSD support was very frustrating, but after working through some of the issues I'm feeling better about it.
• The floppy and DVD drives use the same drive bay. You cannot boot from the floppy and then read from a CD-ROM. Other than early attempts to get FreeBSD working, I haven't needed the floppy drive.
• I opted for the cheaper laptop without built in Ethernet, Infrared, Wireless or CD-RW. I'm of mixed feeling about lacking those options.
• I don't have DVD playing working yet. This needs 16 bit color support at a minimum. I have had luck with ogle and xine on previous machines and am looking forward to getting that functional again.

If you have comments, questions or additional solutions, please send me an email.

Credits

Page layout and things are heavily borrowed from Marius Strom's FreeBSD on a Satellite S3005-S304 page.

Information about running FreeBSD on other laptop systems can be found at FreeBSD on a laptop.