Libretto And Red Hat

Installing RedHat Linux 8.0 on your Toshiba Libretto L1

Here's what I did to install RedHat 8.0 on my Libretto L1:

• Created the pcmcia and pcmciadd image disks. See the [RedHat Installation manual] for details.
• Booted off the floppy disk (with a Sony USB floppy disk drive)
• Inserted the 2nd PCMCIA (pcmciadd) floppy and continued booting
• The installer (anaconda) only offered "hard disk" install because there were problems with the cardbus ethernet. These are documented in RedHat's bugzilla database as [bug 74982].
• I rebooted Windows and copied the ISO images 1-3 on the local windows partition (you don't need the ISO 4,5 and doc for installation). I then repeated installation from the floppy disk.
• Installation itself went fairly smoothly. Unfortunately, there is no graphical install available for installs from the hard disk. Some key parameters:
  • Keyboard "ja106"
  • Mouse Microsoft PS/2 Wheel mouse, emulate 3 buttons
  • When configuring X11, I picked 800x600 as the resolution.

• After the installation finished, I rebooted and got a kernel panic in the ieee1394 kernel module. :-(
• I power cycled the machine and pressed "a" in grub to edit the boot parameters. I added the " single" parameter for single user boot.
• I moved the folder /lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/drivers/ieee1394/ to /lib/modules/notused/ to disable it.
• Terminated the shell with "exit" to boot up in multiuser mode.
• Edited /etc/X11/XF86Config to enable 1280x600 resolution. Used this modeline:

  	ModeLine    "1280x600" 60 1280 1328 1512 1712 600 601 603 625 

Added this line to the "Monitor" section:

 DisplaySize  227 109 

That allows X to correctly compute the DPI. Switched back to the X Console (Alt+F7) and restarted the X server by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Backspace.

• Login. In the RedHat Menu, I went to Preferences -> Fonts. I clicked Subpixel smoothing for LCDs. Under "Details..." I set the DPI to 120. The true DPI is around 141, but that yields too large fonts.

to be continued... (contribute!)

Still untested

• Network / Cardbus
• Sound
• IEEE 1394
• USB (should work OOTB)
• external monitor
• internal modem
• Kernel ACPI support (and the ToshibaAcpiDriver)