# PCMCIA NIC's & Other misc Laptop related Questions :)

## metalhedd

I've got an OLD Toshiba Tecra can't remember the model number right now, I lent it to a friend about 6 months ago, and I'm gonna pick it up tomorow and install gentoo on it  :Smile: .  the NIC That is in it right now is real crap (If you even touch the cable it will go offline) so I need to buy a new one.  a REALLY CHEAP New one. Any suggestions? also I've never gotten around to figuring out apm or acpi or any of that other stuff on my desktop machine, cuz its not really important, but it probably will be nice to have on my laptop, so can anyone point me in the right direction for getting apm working?  lastly, i've seen an option in the kernel for "toshiba laptop support" Whats that all about?

TIA

Andre

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## entity

What I've read, Toshiba Tecras had some problems booting the kernel, as they threw "invalid compression format (err=2)"  while other systems booted just fine. Maybe it's a workaround for this?

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## metalhedd

I guess its possible, but I did have OpenBSD and Debian installed once.  with deb I didn't even get halfway into the installation.  I couldn't get the NIC to work.  but the system booted ok...

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## gregcoit

is a 500cdt.  I'm still messing with the pcmcia - but the card is about as standard as they come (3com 589 - got it for $10 from ebay - including shipping).  I installed gentoo via nfs using tomsrtbt floppy linux - my instructions are at https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=8464.

No kernel issues (using gentoo-sources) at all.

Hope this helps,

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## rac

 *metalhedd wrote:*   

> lastly, i've seen an option in the kernel for "toshiba laptop support" Whats that all about?

 

Have a look at drivers/char/toshiba.c.  Looks like some special hardware control stuff (fan, Fn keys, etc.)  As for the problem another poster in this thread mentioned about not being able to boot bzipped kernels: it doesn't look to me like anything related to that is addressed in there.  If anybody has a Toshiba (or any other laptop) that has this problem, you should be able to simply use "make zImage" or "make vmlinux" instead of "make bzImage".  I used to have to do this on a Thinkpad 760ED.

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