I recently purchased a Toshiba Portege R100 to run Linux (because I was never happy power management on my Dell X200).
General impressions: Great laptop. Light, reasonable screen. Good battery life.
Two other folks have done great pages with detailed Linux installation instructions. See Piete Brooks’ R100 page or Sam Freed’s R100 page.
A couple of personal updates: Under Redhat 9 and Fedora Core 1, power management and video is a little flakey. What I did:
-
get Brooks’ Trident X11 driver. It works OK. Video sometimes goes to 640x480 resolution (after every suspend or screen blank, for example). Work around: toggle to another virtual terminal and back.
On Fedora Core 2, X11 works out of the box! (Although somtimes the resolution still goes off, with the same work-around.)
- USB works fine, until the first suspend. Then it never works again until a reboot. I’m told under Windows if you have a USB device in when you unsuspend it’s OK, but this hangs Linux.
- Suspend/resume hangs on resume if the power status of the machine changes (second battery added/removed, power plugged in or not). On Fedora Core 2 with the 2.6 kernel and ACPI these no longer hang the machine.
Fedora Core 2 and the 2.6 kernel work well, with some caveats.
- Suspend/resume works great with the 2.6.5-1.358 kernel in FC2. Unfortunately it does not work for me in their later kernels (2.6.6-1.435, 2.6.6-1.435-2.2, 2.6.6-1.435-2.3). YMMV.
- The Intel Centrio wireless drivers (ipw2100) work great, though! I installed version 0.54.
FreeBSD
I have reports that FreeBSD 4.x works fine, but that 5.2 “has problems”.