[GTALUG] MP BIOS Toshiba - semi revival

[Russell Reiter]

Since this weekend seems to be my hackers holiday at home, no fires, no
fude's and no FUBAR, I thought I update the progress on the Toshiba laptop
Peter offered up to the list.

When last hacked I had XFCE running on Light DM with a small ram upgrade.
Still not enough to force the video aperture to 64mg but videos played well
and the system did not appear to overheat.

Then I got cocky. I had fixed the dsdt tables but still couldn' connect to
the apic timer. Everything seemed stable so I installed Chrome. The rest
happened so quickly I didn't even have time to say this does not look good
and presto, one cooked drive.

I had acquired the other Toshiba I was helping my friend with when he got
tied of failing to get the battery to charge after installing Windows 7. So
I had another drive to tinker with but there are two important differences
in the laptops. The one Peter gave me has single core and runs without the
battery being installed, the other one is quad core and will not start
without a battery being present.

So what to do, experiment with the other drive or something else, I went
with something else. I removed the drive, removed the battery, removed the
wifi and booted. The unit fails to register the realtek Ethernet and loops
the message but the unit stays alive.

So now I have a fairly quiet three port USB charger. Oh yea, I also have
the unit sitting on a USB cooling base with he access plates removed from
the base but this is for the next part. Sugar on a Stick. This is the base
OS for the one child one computer project. For some reason this OS requires
the battery to be installed in it. I imagine that is because of the form
factor for the prototype laptops which appear to have a perminent built in
battery.
So the upshot is Sugar runs fine, no Ethernet as of yet but the unit itself
is quite stable. Hours of use and I've left it on overnight. No freezups,
crashes or chokes the next day and no excessive heating. No temp gauge but
by hand it feels a lot cooler.

So I will probably upgrade the ram at some point which will increase the
video aperature to 64mg and try a full fedora with LDXE or something
similar.

So thanks to Peter, it's lodes of fun and keeps me out of trouble. Well for
the most part anyway.
:-)  Russell
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