DOSC TWiki snapshot as of mid-2005
Just picked up a Toshiba Satellite S255. As soon as I got it home I began the upgrade process to make it a little more user friendly. I had originally planned on dual booting XP Home and Red Hat 9, but was sorely disappointed to find that purchase of a computer these days doesn't even include that operating system. I only recieved a Toshiba image for the computer. No install CD's, no nothing. This meant I couldn't reinstall XP after a repartition as I had planned. I decided to just stick with Red Hat alone and go for it.
The Red Hat 9 install was fairly painless, with just some minor configuration problems (and one that still plagues me.) To begin, the boot device order needs to be changed so that it looks at the CD drive before the hard drive. Reboot the computer and hold down F2 on the keyboard during boot to get into the bios configuration. When the configuration opens, move over to the boot order screen and move down to highlight the CD drive and press F6 to move it upwards to the top. Press F10 to save the configuration and exit the bios congiuration. Make sure that the Red Hat CD is in the drive and it should boot into the Red Hat install. At the partitioning screen I choose to do it myself and deleted the NTFS partition, added a 512 mb swap partition and filled the rest of the drive with a ext3 partition mounted as /. The rest of the installation is self explanatory. Choose the packages you want to install (I simply went with a Complete install). Installation itself will take a while, the 24x CD drive doesn't exactly fly through it. After installation finish the configuration and reboot. After the reboot you should be able to boot right into Red Hat. Only one problem, the screen will only display up to 800 by 600 resolution. This is fairly simple to fix. Begin by heading to http://www.nvidia.com, then head to Download Drivers, then Linux and FreeBSD drivers, and then download the IA32 driver. su and run the downloaded file (You will probably need to chmod 700 NVIDIA*.run first) This should install all of the drivers for the graphics card. Note: This must be reinstalled any time you use a different kernel. Next head to /etc/X11 and edit XF86Config. You will need to make changes to the Monitor, Device and Screen sections as follows: Section "Monitor"