Toshiba Satellite A100 Review Ubuntu Linux

Posted on: Jun-26-2008 02:16:13 PM by Stevan Ljuljdurovic

I have been using my Toshiba Satellite laptop with Ubuntu Linux for over a year now, and I think I know the in's and out's of this thing pretty well, so lets go over a review of the laptop. I have also briefly tried out different distributions like PCLinuxOS and Fedora, and I will talk about those a bit to.

Here is a list of problems I have had or am having:

  • The LCD screen is nice and bright, however I cannot adjust the brightness level. I have looked a few times and cannot find a fix to adjust the brightness other than reducing the gamma through my settings manager. This is not a very good fix and its pretty annoying when you want to change it just for a bit. I did find a fix that use to work based on the Omnibook driver but I recently tried to install it and it failed on installation. Note: I found out that this Omnibook driver works works for most Toshiba laptop models, just not the A100 so feel free to try it out if you have a different model.
  • The laptop keyboard function keys don't work, this is part of the reason you can't adjust the screen brightness.
  • The multimedia keys on the left hand side don't work and I cannot find a way to map those keys to get them working with anything else.
  • The sound drivers do not work out of the box on some models but you can fix this. I will soon post a article on how to fix the sound driver so look out for that in the related articles section at the bottom of the page.
  • Dual monitors will not work with the gui interface. You need to set up your laptops external monitor in your xorg.conf manually. Read my tutorial on Simple dual monitor setup with XrandR in Ubuntu (Linux) if you want to know how.

Aside from those issues, everything else works as expected. One thing I have not been able to test is a remote to control my media across the room. If anyone has any incite on this please let me know.

Things that work as expected (out of the box):

  • CD-DVD+/-RW
  • Wi-Fi
  • Touch pad
  • Video Card
  • Everything else (I think :).

As for Fedora and PCLinuxOS, both of them are nice, but neither give me the same feel that (k)ubuntu does. My wireless would also stop working in fedora and I did not like PCLinuxOS' package manager.

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Comments

Tim Richardson
Posted on: 2008-07-10 00:45:14

I have Ubuntu 8.04 on my new Toshiba Satellite u400. Out of the box everything worked except for Bluetooth, which was fixed by installing the omnibook modules. I use dual screens, although I had to add a Virtual line in xorg.conf, but this was true of a Dell machine I used to use as well. The only niggle I have is that if I suspend the machine while on AC, the screen brightness resets to 100%. The webcam works with Skype. I upgraded the BIOS as soon as I got the machine, maybe this helped. Overall, the linux support is almost as good as for a Dell.

Dylan
Posted on: 2008-07-30 21:22:41

Try upgrading ur BIOS, this fixed my buttons and brightness problems.

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