[plug] [Semi-OT] Laptops- Toshiba A100

[Tim Bowden]

On Mon, 2007-02-12 at 11:47 +0900, Kirk Turner wrote:
> On 2/12/07, Tim Bowden <tim.bowden at westnet.com.au> wrote:

> > I've always had good success with toshiba (hardware reliability wise and
> > linux wise), to the point where I no longer look seriously at any other
> > brand.
> One thing to note with the toshiba laptops - some of them (my A100 for
> example - which I also got from cybershop) is actually just a rebadged
> compal rather than being a toshiba made toshiba. What this means is
> that the toshiba utils (and hence the toshiba acpi driver) don't work
> with the laptop, and so some of the advanced power management and
> function keys don't work (the acpi driver for the compal (omnibook -
> HP also rebadge these things) doesn't support most of it (because
> compal doesn't release the info). The main one that annoys me is that
> the screen dimmer function keys don't work.
> 
> The easiest way to tell which type of Toshiba you have is at boot
> time. Toshiba toshibas will boot with a toshiba bios, compal toshiba's
> use a phoenix bios (going from memory - I'm not on my laptop atm).
> 
> Playing around with the acpi driver and also getting in touch with the
> author of nvclock (the Nvidia Go 7300 isn't currently supported by
> nvlock) are on my todo list so that I can get some of these things
> working... but its not something I've any experience with and have a
> major learning curve.
> 
> Kirk

Interesting.  I've got a Phoenix bios.  I've never played around with
the acpi driver.  Everything has just worked.  Actually, no.  There is a
couple of things; Occasionally on boot up the video system forgets how
many colours it is displaying.  The screen looks like it is only using
16k colours or some such thing.  If I fire up mplayer, it fixes itself.
No idea what is happening, but the problem is minor enough that I've
never spent any time trying to figure it out.  Hibernate works with the
latest ubuntu kernel (and probably some earlier ones), but not suspend
(never looked into it). No great surprise there.

Regards,
Tim Bowden