Toshiba Satellite P100-MA1

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 12:17:27PM -0500, Randy Jonasz wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone on the list has had experience with this
> notebook (Toshiba Satellite P100-MA1) and linux.  The satellite A20
> I'm currently using is on its last legs.  I like the P100-MA1 because
> it has a 17" wide screen and defaults to 1GB memory with a Core Duo
> processor.  For the money, it seems to be a good buy; but I'll pass if
> its linux support is wanting.

Well specs look decent.

Nvidia 7900 GS will certainly work with the binary nvidia driver,
if it doesn't work with the open source nv driver.

SATA drive should work if the kernel is new enough, unless they somehow
managed to find a totally amazingly recent chipset no one has seen yet.
Dell seems to be experts at doing that, but hopefully all that is
resolved as of 2.6.18 or something around that level.  The SATA dvd
drive may not work yet, but I think it should (possible needing the
libata.atapienabled=1 boot option until it becomes the kernel default,
if it isn't already).

1440x900 screen (16:10) should be OK with the nvidia drivers.  They are
generally quite good at dealing with native LCD resolutions now.

2x1GB RAM seems nice.

120GB HD is about as large as they come (there are a few 160 or 200GB
drives around, but they are new and not common yet).  5400rpm is among
the faster laptop drives, although it doesn't help the battery life
(neither does the 17" screen I guess).

The 5-in-1 card reader will probably not work.  If it is TI based at
least.  Someone is trying to reverse engineer the TI parts (I have seen
them in HP and Compaq systems among others), so potentially some day
they might work.

Audio is intel (It must be an intel chipset), so it should work, if not
now, then pretty soon.

Pointing device is either normal PS/2 mouse compatible, or it might be
an alps/synaptics pad, which there are drivers for.  It may take soem X
config tweaking to adjust the sensitivity (my wife's laptop has a
synaptic touchpad and it was way way way too slow with the default
settings).

So well I would expect it to work fine with a VERY recent distribution
release.  Of course I don't have one so I can't say for sure, but at
least the specs make it look like something I would try if I was to buy
a laptop for linux use.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists