Toshiba Satellite and Linux

Hello - I have been attempting to install various Linux distros on this new Toshiba Satellite A205 laptop. Things appear to go ok with Madriva and Ubuntu, etc, except for one important thing: none of the 5 distros I've tried so far can activate and use either the enternet card, a Marvell, or the wifi, a Realtek.

I thought I could get wifi going by starting off with the ethernet directly connected to my home cable modem, as I have with other laptops, and then download the appropriate drivers, etc for the wireless setup.

But I cannot get a Linux distro to get the ethernet card to connect even though it is listed in the hardware utility (but marked, "unknown"). ??

Any serious, informative suggestions would be appreciated.

- JB

 

If you don't want to use something like NDISWrapper, which allows the use of a WiFi hardware's windows driver under Linux, then this URL is a website which maintains a native Linux RTL8187b driver that other Linux users have been able to compile and load onto their laptops. You can read this post where a Fedora user has compiled and installed the driver, and it includes a good description of the Realtek WiFi hardware. This thread is where some Ubuntu users are discussing the same driver installation. The last post in that thread is an Ubuntu user who describes the steps involved to make it work for their laptop.

The one A205 - Linux installation howto I could find, for a Slackware installation here, describes using the Realtek WiFi HW, and specifically not testing the wired ethernet port. The problem may be that the Marvell Linux ethernet driver for your hardware, which is called sky2, has been very problematic. This very long thread in the Gentoo user forums, goes over some of the problems in great detail.

If you use the latest version of your Linux distro, you can try and see if sky2 loads, ( lsmod |grep sky2 ), and if it doesn't, you can try to load it, ( modprobe sky2 ). If that gets you your wired ethernet port you can then go through the steps outlined in the Realtek posts above, to build that driver. Otherwise if you don't really need the wired ethernet port now, your best bet may be to try and just get your WiFi working, and ignore your wired port for now.

Good Luck..

 

Man, what a post, jas! Thank you for the info and the links.

I will now embark on the little journey, beginning with finding out if sky2 loads.

I will post back here, hopefully from my new Toshiba and Mandriva distro, with the results.

- JB

 

With apologies for the double post, I am posting from my Toshiba Satellite A205 with my new Madriva installation.

I got the driver for Marvell ethernet to load, and now I am going to use this connection to download the appropriate driver for the Realtek RTL8187b wireless card. I'll post back if all of that goes successfully.

Thanx again for the help!

- JB

 

Are you using Mandriva Spring? (2008.1) That's a pretty great distro IMO.