Toshiba Satellite U400-138

Introduction
This article describes the installation and setup of the Toshiba Satellite laptop, an Intel Centrino model U400-138. If not specified otherwise, the used kernel is 2.6.27. As of November 2008 many drivers and utilities still do not recognize all the chips used in this laptop. That is why parameters for omnibook, 915resolution, etc. may change or not be required at all in future versions.

System Specifications
lspci

lsusb (after inserting the omnibook module to make Bluetooth device visible)

Ethernet
The ethernet card is Marvell Yukon. Prior to 2.6.27 this particular model is not supported and the driver requires some patching. In 2.6.27 it works out of the box. The module name is sky2.

Framebuffer
The framebuffer mode requires the VGA BIOS on the graphics card to offer a suitable mode. Unfortunately, this is not the case with this particular modem, the bios has not been updated to support native resolution of the LCD panel (1280x800). This might change later, so it is better to queck it using the vbetest tool.

install required utilities

If the right mode is not available, it is possible to temporarily add it using the 915resolution tool.

install required utilities

However, you will need to rewrite one of the available modes. (915resolution can list them for you) After that the only thing that is left is to insert the uvesafb module. (and enable it on startup, because this will have to be done after every reboot)

changing the resolution and loading userspace vesa framebuffer module

Initramfs
There are situations when putting these commands into init scripts is just not enough. For these cases, creating an initial ram filesystem with everything that is needed is possible.

First, the option has to be enabled in the kernel config.

Then we proceed to create the directory and copy basic directory structure.

Then, busybox and 915resolution have to be compiled statically. (v86d is static by default)

Webcam
lsmod (relevant modules)