[GTALUG] MP BIOS Toshiba - semi revival

[phiscock at ee.ryerson.ca]

Very interesting, Russell. Thanks for the update.

I'm glad we're keeping you off the streets and out of trouble ;).

Regards -
Peter

> 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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-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325