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GNU/Linux on Toshiba L40-157

I bought my Toshiba L40-157 at Trony on the 8th of November, 2007. Windows Vista gave me a BlueScreen in less than 30 minutes. I installed Ubuntu Gutsy.

RTL8187B

This is weird. The hardware seems very flaky. It's internal, but uses the USB bus. Even in Windows it doesn't work for me. It seems as if the device is constantly connecting and disconnecting itself. Most of the time lsusb cannot find it. But, sometimes it comes with stuff like Bus 002 Device 051: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Possible help: ndiswrapper gives me strange things when trying the driver for Windows Vista.
# ndiswrapper -i net8187b.inf

installing net8187b ...
couldn't find models section "Realtek" -
installation may be incomplete
root@guashiba:/root/VistaX86# ndiswrapper -l
net8187b : invalid driver!
And Google couldn't find "net8187b : invalid driver!" yet. But, if you use the driver for Windows XP, which you can download (add link) at realtek.com.tw it seems to be better! Even ndiswrapper doesn't like Vista! Could be useful: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3213248

3D accel

According to lspci the graphics controller is a GM965/GL960 chipset, which is a GMA X3100, the same as in the new MacBooks. At first it gave me a message that my card was blacklisted, but after apt-get install xserver-xgl it's working fine. Weird that gutsy doesn't come with xserver-xgl installed by default.

Suspend

In the short time I have the laptop I suspended several times. With varying results.

Other models, more info?

Check out GNU/Linux on Toshiba laptops at tuxmobil.