ahahaha... boring afternoon.

RedHat Linux 9.0 works fine!

It works great on my Toshiba Satellite 2415-S205. No keyboard problem, sound card works, built-in ethernet card works, touch-pad woks. ACPI doesn't work out of the box, and I don't know how to make it work. Somebody please help me about this.

Just one issue about video card. To enable 3D applications work fast, you should grab the newest driver from NVidia, and it installs easily. But after first reboot, screen resolution is fixed to 800x600, log says it's because of EDID. I don't know what this EDID is, I found option to disable it. So "Device" section of my /etc/X11/XF86Config file looks like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce 4 (generic)"
VideoRam 32768
Option "NvAGP" "3"
Option "Nologo" "false"
Option "IgnoreEDID" "true"

EndSection

Keyboard Problem

The first problem I encounterd was the keyboard problem. They say that the Toshiba laptops have some strange mechanism in the keyboard circuit, so a special patches are needed.. I found it myself.. Once in a while the keyboard types several times.

For example, I type in the keyboard, it displays like 'Gooooooddd morrrrrningggg'. It's very annoying during installing. But be patient. No way to avoid it during installation as far as I know...

After installation, there is some ways to avoid this problem.

The best resolution I found was ....

Open the X configuration file in /etc/X11/XF86Config
Uncomment the line contains Option "XkbDisable"

That solved the problem...

INTRODUCTION

I bought Toshiba Satellite 2415-S205. Fortunately I bought a open-boxed one, so a little cheap. Equipped with 2.0 GHz M-Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD, DVD-CDRW combo, built-in floppy(yuk!). Its price-to-performance ratio is not bad. But when I started to install Linux on it, the nightmare started.

I want to share my experience. Articles will be added here one by one in the format of diary.