Satellite 4090CDS Specs:
Intel PII Celeron 400Mhz
128Mb RAM
30Gb IBM Travelstar IDE
1xUSB
IrDA
RS232+Parallel
Toshiba Laptop IDE DVD Drive (extra Jan-03)
Portege 7220 Specs:
Intel PIII Coppermine 650MHz (has speedstep but doesnt work in linux yet)
128Mb RAM
30Gb IBM Travelstar IDE
1xUSB
IrDA
RS232+Parallel via external dongle
Floppy via external drive
See below for a fix for the bad sound when on battery for both the portege 7220 and satellite 4090.
The Portege and Satellite are able to use kernel 2.4.26 without any problems.
On a note with the graphics, I had briefly spoken with the maintainer of the trident driver for XFree86, he says he DOES have plans to complete the multihead support for the card (al-a win98) but not just yet.
The portege runs very well in Linux 2.6.12-rc3 with APM instead of ACPI. (ACPI suspend to ram [S3] doesnt wake up the pcmcia devices correctly). Obviously, not owning the Satellite any longer I cant test this.
I Chose to install Debian GNU/Linux, I started with a single debian 3.0 CDROM, did a fairly simple install, I got my pcmcia lan card working and downloaded the latest kernel sources (2.4.19), installed the newest pcmcia_cs and then compiled my new kernel,
The main reason for all of this was to make X work properly and give me a good base to compile the wifi drivers for my atmel card and for my cpia2 usb camera.
Compile in support for the following directly into the kernel (no modules):-
Do the traditional make dep;make bzlilo;make modules;make modules_install
When its all done there edit your lilo.conf and find the vga= section and change it to:
vga=0x314
Run lilo again and this will set your satellite to boot in frame buffer vga mode at 800x600 16bit colour, this makes X run alot nicer than if you use the trident drivers, (use fbdev instead)
It is worth saying that i have found playing anything using the Xvideo extension is full of interference unless you compile in the vesa framebuffering into the kernel and boot using 0x314 as your vesa mode.
I dont really know why this is the case, if anyone else knows why then please tell :-)
One solution is to use the framebuffer X driver (thats why i originally included vesafb in the kernel).
On the Satellite DSTN screen version (4090CDS) that i have the max screen resolution is 800x600, its perfectly fine for normal use, its blurry in things like quake (almost unplayable) but the machine is definately fast enough.
After Adding the DVD to my laptop, Video playback over a vesa framebuffer isnt great at all. It made this 400MHz machine judder playing simple mpegs and avis. I did some hunting about, upgraded to the newest binary package of X i could find in debian and applied the following XF86Config-4 file.
Things all worked fine, DVDs and Mpegs were smooth and judder free. A few incidents with my slightly damaged hard-disk lead to me re-installing the system, I found that even with the same Xfree86 versions and configs that unless i compiled vesafb into the kernel that anything I used with Xvideo (Xv) would have green interference all through the bottom portion of the movie.
The drive is a SCD2402 slimline DVD drive, it works very well and is fairly quick. It was a bit of a tight fit with me having to shave a little off of the battery lock but other than that its fine.
I frequently leave it a day or so suspended, even under X, it is fairly well behaved as long as you dont start plugging in usb or ejecting cards while its waking up. I've found it safe to leave it suspended even with 2% battery, but batteries are never the same from machine to machine so you may find otherwise.
Recently I have noticed some oddities with the sound when the machine is under load when running on battery power, I will probably look into ALSA and kernel 2.4.20.
NEW - 2005/may
I have finally realised the sound problems are due to having the CPU in power saving 'sleep' mode while on battery.
Go into the bios when your laptop starts up, (repeatedly press esc and f1) set the cpu speed to be 'always high' instead of dynamically switchable. This might impact your battery time a little.
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/disk
Your muvo should now be mounted as a disk in /mnt/disk, dont forget to unmount before removing it.
If you want any user to be able to mount it when its plugged in and read/write to it then add the following to your /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1 /mnt/disk vfat noauto,rw,user 0 0
Make sure you have a folder called /mnt/disk. This should work unless you have any other scsi hardware, drop me an email if you encounter problems or have suggestions.
I get excellent range with the Dell card and am able to do all the wifi scanning i like by using the 2.4.26 drivers or the orinoco-0.15 drivers
The PCMCIA system on this little laptop works (but is no way a match for an orinoco based card) , I use it with my ATMEL wireless card and with my cardbus rtl8139 100mbit card.
I've only had one or two situations when inserting the cardbus card locks up the machine, after two months of use with this card its only happened twice.
Finally, good luck with this laptop, its fantastically useful to me, and works well, reliable and fairly fast, not a games machine with a DSTN but not bad for starcraft under wine :-). (and redalert works well too)
Oh the text stretch option in the bios will stretch the 640x480 display to the 800x600 of the screen, if you do use it, it will look dredful, but its not too bad to look at under starcraft :0)
Toshiba Cardstation IV (PA-3024-E)
Toshiba Enhanced Port Replicator IV (PA-2731)
These two are designed for the 4xxx series and the 4090 works in these with little hastle.
For my 4090CDS i had to upgrade the BIOS for the machine to see that it was docked properly (without it i could not use the extra pcmcia slot)
Although, under linux and win98 (all ive tried so far) if you power on when not in the dock and plug it in while its running then you cant use the pcmcia (i havent tried running pcmcia controller as a module yet) and if you have anything plugged into the laptop's own USB port, the moment you dock it, you will only be able to use the USB ports on the dock (a little odd i thougt)
The sound and VGA pass through work ok (sound is a little crackly sometimes)
Bidding for them on ebay you might find one for as little as £20 or as much as £45 postage on them is usually about £9.
Ian (bredroll) Norton-Badrul