Anyone have user experience with Toshiba Satellite laptops?

WetGeek

brent Could not install Plasma due to swap and PXE error.

I offer my condolences. Sounds like it's not a Plasma problem, but it's one I've never encountered.

Axios

brent Most bios you can disable pxe boot.

brent

Axios disabled secure boot. it's a very small bios with like two windows. I have to read everything better maybe

brent

Axios nah this was a ridiculously small bios and 'pxe' was not visible in any text...I did not press everything that would lead me to a multiple choice window for context.

I don't like laptop life so far. Solus behaves so different. In nemo stuff is underlined/hyperlinked. Like a file name for instance. If you click on the file name it does not copy the file name. It copies "/home/brent/blah/blah/blah/filename". what good is this? that's what ctrl+L does..there's more but I only have so much kleenex for my crying
--I'm starting to realize that desktop/laptop are two very different installs and two very different behaviors.

once I get past this ^^^ I'm golden

BuzzPCSOS

brent What CPU have you got inside the Satellite? I have got an old Tosh Satellite with an Intel i3 gen 3 or 4 in it which I am pretty sure ran Solus very sweetly. If yours is of a similar age I would be happy to do a parallel install and we could work through any issues together.

WetGeek

brent desktop/laptop are two very different installs and two very different behaviors

It's interesting that you say that. I have Plasma installed on three laptops and two desktops here, and I haven't noticed such a difference. I think it might be just a feature of the DE you chose to use.

brent

BuzzPCSOS What CPU have you got inside the Satellite? I have got an old Tosh Satellite with an Intel i3 gen 3 or 4 in it which I am pretty sure ran Solus very sweetly. If yours is of a similar age I would be happy to do a parallel install and we could work through any issues together.

WetGeek It's interesting that you say that. I have Plasma installed on three laptops and two desktops here, and I haven't noticed such a difference. I think it might be just a feature of the DE you chose to use.

growing pains maybe. I think I was expecting the laptop to behave like a desktop. two different animals, see https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/discussions/618. it's a 2-core intel with 4GB made in the fine year 2015.
I will grind it out, Hell, it was free I should be complaining about nothing, actually.

WetGeek

brent I should be complaining about nothing, actually.

True. But that doesn't change my belief that the differences you're experiencing are likely due to the DE you're using on it. As I said, I use Plasma on laptops and desktops here, and as far as I can tell, they operate identically.

brent

WetGeek True. But that doesn't change my belief that the differences you're experiencing are likely due to the DE you're using on it. As I said, I use Plasma on laptops and desktops here, and as far as I can tell, they operate identically.

that is also a factor I did not consider

BuzzPCSOS

WetGeek Very true. I also run Plasma on a laptop and a desktop, operation is mostly identical. The biggest difference is when running CPU or GPU intensive tasks like video editing and then the desktop shines through despite being much older.

brent

@BuzzPCSOS @WetGeek

these words have never left my mouth or fingertips ever but the budgie experience is really poor for me on the laptop and does not behave in any way like the Solus Budgie desktop I've used for 8 years. It's like opposite world.
Simple mission: make trusty laptop. On to solus plaz or xfce--no energy/time for hopping.

I will mark one of you solved to close this thing. I understand these old Toshibas now. They are slow by nature and a budget computer a decade ago. But big screen for its time and Linux does speed it up.

brent

brent I will mark one of you solved to close this thing.

MODS guess the off-topic thing takes away my SOLVED powers. At your convenience. Thank you.

Axios

brent I never got try Linux on my toshiba about that timeframe
The cat pissed on the keyboard and it went up in flames..lol (no joke)
(Blinks)

WetGeek

brent On to solus plaz or xfce--no energy/time for hopping.

I've pointed out that I rank Xfce second after Plasma, but as true as I believe that is, it's not a close second. I strongly recommend that you make your next adventure one tht features Plasma. Any DE requires a little bit of familiarizing -- knowing where to look for settings, etc. -- but at least in Plasma they're all in one place.

No gloating here. I'm just pleased that you're considering it. I know you won't regret spending the time to get to know it.

BuzzPCSOS

@brent I know this is an old thread now but this needed to be posted.
I dug out my old Toshiba Satellite today and tried to install Solus Plasma on it. The live edition ran fine and I did the install using all the automatic preset choices.
On reboot nothing, it was like there was nothing there.
It turns out that my satellite was, in windows terms, an MBR legacy boot system. With Linux on it there should have been a grub shell to start off the whole boot up. For some reason Solus 4.5 installer did not detect the need for grub and installed a UEFI system or I missed the fact that you need to scroll down at some point during the install and tick the "install grub" box. Pretty sure it is easy to miss.
I have successfully installed Solus onto other computers that require Grub but it has been a while.
Either way maybe worth revisiting with that in mind, or perhaps a Solus 4.4 iso.
Good luck.
Edit: Been fiddling with this a bit. Something is definitely not quite right here. Other Linux systems installed fine but did not use a fat32 boot partition just a single ext4 partition.

brent

BuzzPCSOS It turns out that my satellite was, in windows terms, an MBR legacy boot system. With Linux on it there should have been a grub shell to start off the whole boot up. For some reason Solus 4.5 installer did not detect the need for grub and installed a UEFI system or I missed the fact that you need to scroll down at some point during the install and tick the "install grub" box. Pretty sure it is easy to miss.

thanks for this buzz.
I found if you create a bios password you get five more mystery bonus bios entries. you have to use a couple of these magic entries to install solus. first you need to switch to a CSM install. legacy and uefi will not work. it gets weirder. but no more blank screen.

BuzzPCSOS

brent I compared Solus with a Debian based system which created no boot partition.
I have just installed Solus by setting my own partition to a single ext4 partition with a mount point of \ and one flag set as boot. The installer immediately flagged that I needed a fat32 boot partition which I ignored. Carried out the install, rebooted. Everything working fine.
There might be a configuration fault in the calmares installer.
When I set and installed to a single partition, immediately after install but before rebooting, the partition was available to view via the file manager. When the default boot partition was installed the hard drive was not available from the file manager despite showing mounted in KDE Partition Manager.
Edit: I might not have got everything right here as it messed up when I updated.
I will try a bit more fiddling.
Edit 2: I think I can see where I went wrong here, new kernels get copied to the boot partition but as I did not make one, the OS could not find the update files.
I'm not going to persue that method anymore.
I am glad you found a way to get Solus on your machine. Maybe I will try again when 4.5 gets released. I think I remember Toshiba BIOS not playing well with Linux some time back. There are other distros that seem to have overcome those hurdles and installed without any tweaks (or a boot partition) I wonder if Solus might be making similar changes in future ISOs.

BuzzPCSOS

brent Still fiddling with my Toshiba, latest Solus (4.6) will not install and then boot either.
Tried some other OSs that had similar layout to Solus for legacy install - Boot partition, Swap and Root. None of them installed but Spiral OS went on without a murmur. I think the mods you did allowed you to tell the BIOS what boot image to look for, where the unmodified Toshiba BIOS just wasn't clever enough to make that action.
I think the difference with Spiral is that you install onto a single Btrfs formatted partition which does not confuse the stock BIOS.
Going to try an install with Fedora which also has an exclusive stock install onto Btrfs just to prove my theory. This seems to be the next up-and-coming file system for Linux as a lot of other distros seem to be adopting it as default. Maybe this will be the partition choice for Solus in builds to come.

brent

PS--I put both those two Satellites in a box for now. They can't/don't/won't do much light normal stuff with 2GB. Have no idea if memory upgradable to 4...but if this is 2 then I don't want to see 4. Shocked my dad could even play Solitaire on this.

BuzzPCSOS I think the mods you did allowed you to tell the BIOS what boot image to look for, where the unmodified Toshiba BIOS just wasn't clever enough to make that action.

that has to be the difference I think. Ironically I think Toshiba is BRTFS-friendly, Be interested to see if your theory was correct. I got Solus on my Satellite but man I had to pull some strings 🙂

BuzzPCSOS

brent Fedora went in like a perfect install but then no boot 🙁
I took a look at the Fedora partition layout while installing Spiral OS and the two were significantly different. Spiral seems to have only one Btrfs partition whereas Fedora had two small unidentified partitions in front of the main Btrfs partition. I'm guessing Boot and Swap.
It looks like having more than the one partition is what causes the install to fail on the Toshiba as I could also make Solus bootable by avoiding the boot partition and just making a single Ext4 partition and setting it's flag as boot with a mount of / (think that was what I did). Solus booted after the install but could not survive updates probably because new kernels would have been written to/expected to be in the non-existant boot partition.
Spiral OS could be the answer on those old Toshibas. Don't know how 2Gb RAM would feel as this one got upgraded to 4Gb when it went from win7 to win10. A SSD makes a huge difference on old tech like this as would disabling ZRAM and enabling ZSWAP. If you are doing that on a recent kernel make sure that swappiness is up at 100 for best results.

« Previous Page Next Page »