Toshiba Satellite C650D is a budget laptop. It has been released last summer by Toshiba and as any new computer it makes installing Linux quiet challenging. Below is a list of problems I have encountered while trying to have a stable Linux distribution on this machine and solutions that worked for me.
Resizing Windows Partitions
The C650D comes loaded with Windows7. No installation DVDs are provided. All four hard drive partitions are used by Toshiba:
- Partition one contains the bootloader.
- Partition two is the Windows7 partition.
- Partition three is used to store extra languages.
- Partition four is the recovery partition.
First of all, burn the recovery DVDs using the Recovery tool that comes with the laptop. You will need four DVDs.
Once your recovery DVDs are burnt, you can start palying with the hard drive partitions:
- Defragment partition 2. You can either use Windows defragmentation utility or PerfectDisk. The latter is a commercial product, though they offer a free trial. The goal of defragmentation is to be able to shrink the Windows7 partition as much as possible.
- Resize Partition2. I was able to shrink this partion from 200GB to 80GB.
- Delete partition3 (the languages partition), if applicable.
- You can also delete partition4 (the recovery partition). I have chosen to play it safe and kept this partition.
Choosing A Linux Distribution
I have tried to install a few distributions on this laptop.
- As I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva for the past 7 years, this distribution seemed to be the logical choice. I downloaded Mandriva 2010 Spring Edition. Trying to boot my computer from the live CD caused the machine to freeze. I did not get any error messages. This happened for the 64 and 32 bits releases. So, I had to give up on Mandriva.
- Next, I tried to install Linux Mint, out of curiosity bout this increasngly popular distribution. Booting from the live CD led to the same consequences as Mandriva: black screen of death, without any error messages.
- Last, I went for Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu Lucid (10.04), Ubuntu Maverick (10.10) and Kubuntu 10.10 Beta. After many experiments, I have settled down on Ubuntu 10.04. Ubuntu 10.10 was very slow and brought more problems than it solved. Kubuntu offers better performance, though it is also unstable for now. It seems that many of these problems are due to the Linux kernel itself (2.6.35).
Downloading Ubuntu 10.04
As this article is being written, Maverick is the official ubuntu release. Though, it is always possible to download Ubuntu 10.04 from these torrents:32 bit ISO im age and AMD 64 ISO image. I went for the AMD64 image and it worked very well on my computer.
Booting Ubuntu From The Live CD
Insert your Ubuntu live CD. The system will start booting. You will get to the purple splash screen, then comes a black screen with many intricate errors all bout ACPI. To solve this problem, follow these steps:
- Restart your computer.
- Press Esc (or any key) when you get to the splash screen.
- Choose a language.
- Press F6. A menu pops up. Select the acpi=off item and hit enter (a cross will appear at the left of the menu item).
- Hit Esc again, select an option in the main menu (Try Ubuntu Without Installation or Install Ubuntu).
The installation process is mostly painless. You just need to think about how are you going to partition the free space you got from Windows. I have created the following logical partitions:
- A 20GB partition that mounts to '/' to store Ubuntu and all system packages.
- A 60 GB partition that mounts to '/home' for user account.
- A swap partition is created automatically.
- A small 10GB partition that mount to '/' for Kubuntu.
The remaining free space is for future distributions.
Booting The Newly Installed OS
Once the installation process is over, restart your computer and do the following:
- As soon as you get to GRUB menu, navigate to the item corresponding to your Ubuntu installation (this should be the first item in the menu).
- Hit key 'e'. A simple text editor shows up.
Move the cursor to the end of this line:
linux /vmlinuz... ro quiet splash
Add acpi=ht to the end of this line, so that it will look like:
linux /vmlinuz... ro acpi=ht
The acpi=ht disables hyperthreading support. As AMD processors do not implement hyperthreading anyways, adding this will not hinder the performance of your system. If acpi=ht does not work, you can choose the most drastic solution which is disabling ACPI support alltogether. This will have many consequences, in particular your system will be using only one CPU instead of the available two.
Making The ACPI Solution Persistent
Changes made withing the GRUB menu are forgotten as soon as you turn your computer off. In order for these changes to stay, you will need to add them to GRUB's configuration file.
Edit GRUB default configuration file:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
Change line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi=ht"
- Save your changes and exit gedit.
Propagate your changes to the current bootloader by typing:
sudo update-grub
- At this point you should be abple to reboot your computer without getting any ACPI errors.
Enabling The Ethernet Card
WiFi works out of the box. However, the Ethernet card is not supported by the Ubuntu 10.04 distribution. The C650D uses a recent product from Atheros the AR8152 card. You will need to compile a driver provided by Linuxwireless.org. Please follow this instructions posted by pytheas22 in this thread. This will help you to install the atl1c module, the driver that supports this card.
Dealing With Sound Problems
The C650D comes equipped with an Azalia SBx00 sound card from ATI Technologies. Ubuntu 10.04 supports this card, partially as you will notice the following anomalies:
- External headphones do not work. Audio will play out of the computer speakers and out of the headphones at the same time.
- The microphone does not work.
In order to solve this problem you should:
- First, upgrade your Alsa driver to version 1.0.23. Stéphane Gauderault detailed this procedure in his blog.
- Download and install the Alsa driver provided by Linuxant and follow the steps posted by saiganeshb.
I am not sure if step 1 is still necessary, maybe you could skip it.
However, this solution has a couple of drawbacks:
- Whenever you do an Ubuntu update, and if the updates include the Alsa driver, then you will have to reinstall the Linuxant driver once the update is over.
- Linuxant driver does not handle concurrent playback very well. For instance, if I play a YouTube video in Firefox, stop it, then open Rythmbox and try to play an MP3 file, then Rythmbox will not play it. I have to exit Firefox and release the sound card first.
The Kernel 2.6.35 Route
Another way to solve the ACPI problem is to upgrade to Kernel 2.6.35. You may do this from Ubuntu 10.04 or by installing Ubuntu 10.10.
Upgrading to Kernel 2.6.35 solves the ACPI problem, but not the audio problem. To make things works, using the Linuxant driver as described above does not help. yossman wrote a post on how to upgrade to 2.6.35 and get the audio working properly. I tried his solution on my side. This solved the ACPI and audio problems. Better, the new Alsa driver allows concurrent audio playback. Kernel 2.6.35 comes with atl1c the ethernet card driver. My ethernet card was detected, however whenever I tried to navigate to some URL, the browser keeps looking for the address and never loads the page. This problem might be specific to my system though as others seem to have had the ethernet card working properly.
I have also compiled the latest Alsa driver snaphot in Kubuntu 10.10 (which uses K 2.6.35), though this did not solve the problem, actually it made things worse as Kubuntu failed to detect the sound card after the installation and it showed a "dummy output" in the mixer instead of the card's name.
Conclusions
After all these endless hours spent reading forums/blogs and experimenting with various solutions, I think that I will stick to the Ubuntu 10.04, 64 bits release. The only drawback I have is the impossibility to play audio concurrently, but I can live with that. Upgrading the Kernel to 2.6.35-rc1 might be a good solution for some (many?) others. I would not recommend upgrading to Maverick 10.10, until all the performance issues are dealt with by the Ubuntu community.