x trouble with toshiba laptop

[tbee]

I just ran the Gentoo Live DVD on my older Toshiba M40-277 laptop; Gentoo is the only distribution so far that recognizes the Atheros AR2413 WLAN chip, but strangly enough it recognizes the ATI chip, does not not correctly start X (I end up with a blinking single line cursor). That is what the other distro's do correctly.

[BradN]

Thanks for the info.

If you want a graphical environment while installing gentoo, try a 32/64 bit linux mint install cd (depending what type of gentoo you want) - I suspect you may have more luck with the wireless networking in there than some other livecds. You could do a text mode only install with a gentoo cd, but running into further problems it can be difficult to post error messages.

[tbee]

Thanks for the suggestion, downloading now.

My goal is to test if Linux on the laptop is a suitable alternative for my g/f; she feels the laptop is too slow and even after a reinstall windows XP seems to be gulping away at the 512MB. Personally I'm fairly skilled at using Linux, installing it often is a hassle - as this is a example. But my g/f absolutely is not, so I wanted to test a few distro's without having to destroy the windows install on the laptop. But all the LiveCD so far have an issue; either no WLAN, or no X. Will test Mint in 15 minutes

[tbee]

The fact that that wireless is not reported in ifconfig does not mean it is not recognized; lspci shows the Atheros AR2413 under Gentoo, Debian and Mint (so I assume Ubuntu will work as well), but Gentoo / Mint are the only ones listing a wlan0. So I need to figure out how to configure the WLAN to access may wireless network. Mint has a nice tool, but my first attempts didn't work. More research required.

Mint Gnome suffers from the same problem as Ubuntu does: sluggish UI when run from CD / DVD. So I'm going to test the LXDE window manager next, to see if that is the culprit.

[BradN]

lspci is a generic program and should work the same on every distro (though older distros won't have the names of newer devices, only their ID numbers). But, when the network device doesn't show up in ifconfig, that means there's no driver being loaded for that network card. I suggested mint because they seem aggressive about making devices work right from the livecd/dvd at the cost of bending some licenses to include the needed software.

Sluggish UI as if the display isn't being accelerated? (like vesafb for example?) Or just slow like most livecd's are in starting programs?

What kind of display chip is present (check lspci)?

btw, I'm becoming a fan of LXDE - I'm running it on my laptop right now. It doesn't have many fancy features like kde/gnome, but I've only found a couple minor glitches.

[tbee]

Sluggish as in accessing the CD/DVD on every UI action; window drag, window resize, new application.

Burning the LXDE Mint version now and going to test the MintWifi thing I googled.

[BradN]

The slowdowns when the cd is being accessed can basically be ignored when the OS is installed to the hard drive. CD/DVD's are just that slow. That said, it probably shouldn't need to access it on _every_ move or resize unless the system doesn't have enough RAM.

[tbee]

Hm. I'm not getting it; mintWifi does try to obtain an IP address on both eth0 and wlan0, but chances are high there is a WPA password required for a wlan connection and it doesn't ask for that. Setting the info in the Wireless config applet is not enough. Venturing on.

[tbee]

Linux once again is proving why I keep everyone at home on Windows; iwconfig, wicd, networkmanager, wpa_supplicant... And WLan is still not working.

[BradN]

I just make sure to get hardware I know works