New Laptop and Linux

I recently bought myself a new Toshiba Laptop, model T135D-S1325 for anyone who's interested.  I'm always impressed when laptop hardware actually works in Linux, and since I couldn't find much on Google, I thought I'd share the highlights.

Whatever Windows 7/Toshiba partitioning setup they put on here causes ntfs-resize to break Windows when I tried it.  Not that I really mind, but I tried (and failed) to back up the existing setup in case I ever needed it.

The screen brightness function keys are done in hardware, so they work under Linux.  This is really nice, since on my last Toshiba laptop where I had to boot into Windows to change it.

However, most of the other function-keys don't work. No real surprise here, but there doesn't seem to be any other hardware wifi switch, which is mildly annoying.

I haven't tried the webcam, and maybe never will. I don't trust them...
[Edit: I have since gotten the webcam working. It was also fairly painless.]

My X server came up on HAL without hardly any configuration on my part, but the synaptics touchpad was a little bit of a pain.  I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I can't seem to initialize the thing right, so that tapping the pad sends a mouse click.  But, I can get it to work manually by running synclient TapButton1=1, so I just set that to run as part of my XFCE startup and I'm off and running.

There also doesn't seem to be a way in the BIOS to require a password to boot off of a flashdrive. I set an "administrator password" (to change BIOS settings) only, because otherwise the "user password" needs to be entered every boot to access the hard disk, so it's possible that would do it for me. At any rate, after digging around on the internet, it sounds like there's a master Toshiba password that'll clear it all out anyway, so I suspect I am vulnerable to flashdrive booting no matter what. Such is life.

The only real challenge was the wireless card, which took me several days to finally nail. The wireless card does not currently have a driver in the mainline kernel.  It shows up as this in lspci.

09:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8172 (rev 10)

After splicing together several howto guides, and the terribly written readme in the driver itself, I finally managed to get it working. Getting wpa_supplicant working with it was even harder. Apparently over several versions of the chipset/driver they switched the wpa interface from ipw2200 to wext. The readme tries to explain as much with a step-by-step guide that's on par with the IRS tax code in clarity. Here's what finally worked for me:

Get the driver from here Realtek Drivers. The driver is "RTL8192SE" (despite the fact that it doesn't match the version in lspsci...) Extract it somewhere and run make install. Every time I update my kernel the make install fails, and I have to manually create the /lib/modules/2.6.32-gentoo-r7/kernel/drivers/net/wireless directory before make install works. I also had to manually copy the contents of firmware/RTL8192SE into /lib/firmware/RTL892SE. You can do it yourself without make install, but you have to copy the module into /lib/modules and run depmod yourself. At this point, it kind of worked, but I would get weird error messages. Apparently the driver needs a bunch of library routines in the kernel's wifi code. Specifically the 802.11 TKIP routine and one of the MAC algorithms. I just went through and turned on as much as I could and it eventually worked.

Use the following settings for wpa_supplicant: (This highly depends on specific chipset and revisions!)

wpa_supplicant_args="-c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -D wext -i wlan0"

And that's it. Other than the wifi card, the whole setup was much less painful than my last laptop. Linux has come a long way...