NetBSD on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4280 / A NetBSD (Love) Story

[atomicules <base%atomicules.co.uk@localhost>]

tl;dr: To get a Linksys WPC55AG Wireless PCMCIA card and a Toshiba 
Satellite Pro 4280 (4200 series) to play nicely set as Cardbus/16 bit 
in the BIOS and disable fdc, midi and mpu in userconf.

---

I've been using NetBSD for about a year now, since switching to it 
from OSX 10.5 when my ageing Powerbook (which I basically used 
remotely as a "shell account") finally died. So I replaced it with 
Linode and a Xen instance of NetBSD. The switch was painless and easy 
as everything I wanted to run (mutt, elinks, etc) was already cross 
platform and either available as binaries or through pkgsrc.

So firstly, thanks for that. NetBSD is a great.

In the last couple of weeks I've been able to replace the ageing 
powerbook with an even older Toshiba Satellite Pro. This thing is a 
beast! It must be about 4cm thick with the lid closed.

I had to order a CD from [osdisc][1] since I no longer have access to 
any machine with a CD writer (curse technological process!) and the 
Toshiba can't boot from USB and doesn't have an ethernet port.

After much reading of the email archives and the [ath][2] manual page 
I decided to go for a [Linksys WPC55AG][3] PCMCIA card which I could 
get for about £4 and was still boxed, shrink-wrapped and new!

When both had arrived in the post I was initially disheartened 
(absolutely gutted) that I couldn't get it to boot up and work. I 
could get it booted from the CD, no problem, but it would hang as soon 
as I tried to run dhcpcd.

In my haste I decided to install to disk and see if that would work 
better than just from the CD - of course, it didn't.

After more reading around I found out [about audio conflicts][4] and 
this made sense as the speakers would make a noise when going through 
pcmcia bit on boot, but since I couldn't get the sources on to the 
machine in any way yet (Plugging in a USB stick would hang the 
machine) I was stuck. 

I then got it into my head that I needed to enable acpi and that would 
solve all my problems (in hindsight: completely unrelated). Due to the 
age of the BIOS it was disabled by NetBSD. Due to my haste to install 
to disk I'd neglected to look into updating the BIOS ([good on 
Toshiba, they still provide them][5]; too late for an eager beaver 
though). There are [quite][6] [a][7] [few][8] [references][9] to 
`acpi_force_load`, but no answers as to how to use it (I presume 
somehow as a boot parameter?). The other option is enabling it in the 
kernel, but again, how to compile my own kernel? I briefly thought 
about trying to get hold of a Windows CD and re-installing it just so 
I could update the BIOS. Fortunately I didn't have to.

I found a post about setting cards as [Cardbus/16 bit as best for 
NetBSD][10] and indeed I did not have this set as so in the BIOS, I 
had "Auto-Selected". So I changed this to 16 bit, but then it wouldn't 
boot and would hang at `fdc at fdc0 drive 0: 1.44MB, 80 cyl, 2 head, 
18 sec`.

In looking into how to enable acpi I found this post about [how to 
_disable_ it via userconf][11]. I had a bit of a light-bulb moment and 
thought that if you could `disable acpi` via userconf I could try 
disabling `fdc` since that is where it was hanging on boot. It worked! 
But then immediately hung at `midi`, but that made sense because of 
what I'd read and seen about audio conflicts. I disabled that and then 
`mpu` because it also hung there and finally it booted up and in the 
moment of truth `dhcpcd` also worked.

With 128MB ram, I can't do much with it, but enough to make it a 
useful machine. I'm using [dwm][12], [st][13] and [mksh][14] and I can 
ssh to my Linode NetBSD box which is the main thing. It actually 
launches [surf][15] for browsing easily, it's just loading some sites 
where I'll run out of memory; Dillo is fine.

Next steps will be re-building the kernel with fdc, midi and mpu 
disabled to avoid having to do that manually on start-up. Might one 
day play about with I/O space for the PCMCIA card, but not any time 
soon as I don't need the floppy drive or audio.

So that's all really, just wanted to say thanks add some info to the 
mail archives for all the other people like me who spend all their 
time searching instead of posting.


[1]: https://www.osdisc.com/products/netbsd
[2]: http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?ath+4+NetBSD-6.0+i386
[3]: 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linksys-Dualband-WPC55AG-UK-Wireless-Notebook/dp/B000BF0EOG/
[4]: http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/wavelan.html#Lockups_i386
[5]: http://www.toshiba.eu/innovation/download_bios.jsp?service=EU
[6]: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2010/08/04/msg014028.html
[7]: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2010/10/14/msg014530.html
[8]: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/2011/01/17/msg002271.html
[9]: http://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-6.0.html
[10]: http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/Toshiba/www/netbsd/cards.htm
[11]: http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/bx/blosxom.cgi/index.front?-tags=proplib
[12]: http://dwm.suckless.org/
[13]: http://st.suckless.org/
[14]: https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm
[15]: http://surf.suckless.org/