Installing Red Hat Linux 6.0 and Windows 95 on a Toshiba 220 CDS

Contents

• Setting up a Toshiba Satellite 220 CDS to dual boot Windows 95 or Red Hat Linux 6.0
• Setting up XFree86 3.x
• Replacing the hard drive
• Installing Red Hat 8
• Setting up XFree86 4.x
• [Not] Getting the Xircom CEM33 Credit Card Ethernet Modem working under RH8
• Installing Red Hat 6.2
• Links

Setting up a Toshiba Satellite 220 CDS to dual boot Windows 95 or Red Hat Linux 6.0

1. Find the "Certificate of Authenticity" on the Windows 95 manual that came with the computer (needed to reinstall Windows).
2. Find the "Toshiba Companion Floppy" that came with the computer (might be handy in case you need to access the CD-ROM in real mode).
3. Find the "Toshiba Drivers Disc" CD that came with the computer, and the Xircom driver disks that came with the combo Ethernet/Modem card I got as an addon when I bought the machine (needed to reinstall drivers).
4. Buy 30 blank floppies. Use the utility (the one that bugs you periodically) to finally make a Windows 95 Startup disk and a set of Windows 95 Setup disks (29 disks!) (needed to reinstall Windows).
5. Back up important user data to floppy. We are about to DELETE THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF THE HARD DRIVE.
6. Boot with the Win95 startup disk. Run FDISK. Don't enable Large Disk Support - it might be safer to live with FAT16, and you don't need FAT32 for the small Windows parition you're going to create. Repartition the hard drive using fdisk in the following order:
   • 256 MB primary DOS partition (for C:)
   • 20 MB seconary DOS partition (for /boot)
   • 980 MB (or big enough to leave just 120 MB left) seconary DOS partition (for /)
   • 120 MB seconary DOS partition (for swap)
7. Reboot from Win95 reinstall floppy. Install Windows 95, using the minimum install, but making sure important things like dialup networking and wordpad are included. This takes two hours, as you have to swap thirty floppies in and out. It formats all four partitions on the drive, even though only the first one (the 256 MB partition) will be used by Windows.
8. Reboot into Win95.
9. (Optional) Make a directory C:\win95. Copy the cab files from the 29 Windows setup floppies into it. This will make Windows never prompt you to insert a floppy again, at the cost of 40 MB of disk space. You can do this on demand - i.e. when Windows prompts you for a setup floppy, you can copy it into C:\win95 first, then tell Windows to look there.
10. Insert the Toshiba Companion CD-ROM. Look in the "chips", "sound", and "cardworks" sections for README files, and follow the instructions there to install the right screen, sound, and PCMCIA drivers (installing cardworks will fail with a message telling you how to tell Windows to install its own PCMCIA support. Once you've done that, try installing Cardworks again.)
11. If you have a Xircom card, install the Xircom drivers by running the setup program on Xircom floppy #1. (I still don't have them quite working.)
12. Make sure your Windows setup is working properly. If you need to reinstall Windows, it might be good to do it before installing Linux.
13. Reboot the computer, and press ESC during the memory check (or run TSETUP.EXE from the Toshiba Companion Floppy). This will bring up the BIOS setup screen. Switch the boot priority to FD-CD-HD, to enable booting from CD-ROM.
14. Insert the Red Hat 6 disc and reboot.
15. Install Red Hat 6 as normal from the local CD-ROM drive. During install, you won't need to repartition the disk, but you will have to use Linux's fdisk to change the partition types on the /, /boot, and swap partitions you made earlier with the DOS fdisk.

Setting up XFree86 3.x on the Toshiba Satellite 220 CDS

• When setting up X, pick screen type "LCD panel 800x600", graphics card 65554 or server type SVGA, and screen resolution 8 bit, 640x480.
• Don't enable graphical login yet - you may need to futz with XF86Config first.
• Set up XF86Config as follows:

  cd /etc/X11
  cp XF86Config XF86Config.bak
  

  Fix the mode lines and options in XF86Config to fit the CT65554 graphics chipset and LCD screen; settings that seem to work for me are

       HorizSync    29-61
       VertRefresh    50-85
       Modeline "640x480" 25.00 640 648 672 792 480 493 497 535
       Modeline "800x600" 34.00 800 816 848 904 600 609 614 637   
  

  and

       Option      "sw_cursor"
       Option      "no_stretch"
       Option      "lcd_center"      
  

  and

       Depth       16
       Modes       "800x600"
  

  These options work for many similar Toshiba laptops, e.g. the Toshiba Satellite Pro 425cds.
  Here's my complete /etc/X11/XF86Config.
• You may want to peek at my tips on accessing Windows fonts from Linux.

Replacing the hard drive on the Toshiba Satellite 220 CDS

There is no doc on this anywhere on the net as far as I can see, probably because it's pretty easy. To remove the hard drive, you only need to remove the hard drive cover and slide out the drive tray. The hard drive cover is a 14mm x 77mm x 250mm L-shaped piece of plastic that wraps around from the bottom of the laptop to the front. If the computer is sitting normally in front of you, you can see the cover easily; it's below the display latch, to the right of the microphone, to the left of the drive activity lights. It is held in place by one philips-head screw and a tab. After removing the screw, gently flex the cover forward to free the cover from the tab; the easiest way to do this is to slide your thumbnail into the gap betwen the case and the cover, just below the display latch, and slide your thumbnail to the left while prying the cover forward to lift its top edge away from the case. The cover should pop off willingly when your thumb gets past the middle of the cover.

The stock hard drive mine came with was type HDD2714 (aka MK1403MAV). harddrives4less has a page about it, as does Chris Hooper. It's a 2.5 inch slimline (12.5mm thick) EIDE4 drive. Turns out the best place to get these appears to be driveguys.com. They had 14 in stock, for a reasonable price, and delivered a working drive (without mfr's warranty, oh well) quickly.

Installing Red Hat 8

# mknod hdc b 22 0
# mount hdc /source/cdrom -t iso9660

Setting up XFree86 4.x on the Toshiba Satellite 220 CDS

In case anyone from Red Hat is reading, here's the stack dump:

/usr/bin/anaconda line 694 in ?
/usr/lib/anaconda/text.py line 425, in run
/usr/lib/anaconda/textw/xconfig_text.py, line 259, in call

But since I didn't install GTK, Red Hat's X configuration tools did not install; all that was left was the icky /usr/X11R6/xf86config. (This is the second Red Hat 8 install where I've had to use that, out of six installs!)

Ugly though it may be, xf86config did the trick this time. I picked 2MB video RAM, Chips and Technologies 65554 graphics chip, 16 bits/pixel, and 800x600. After it finished, I edited /etc/X11R6/XF86Config to uncomment the

Option "no_stretch"

The only window manager installed was the fallback twm, but that was (just barely) good enough for me.

alias eth0 xircom_pc