# Toshiba Protege 3500 (tablet)

## owensd

I was wondering if anyone has had any success getting Gentoo installed on this machine. In order to even install it, I must have another distro (Red Hat) installed on the machine as once the Gentoo boot CD boots, it cannot read from the CD. [NO CD FOUND... something like that].

I know that one of the developers has this machine and I was wondering what his/her luck has been?

Specifically, here are the problems that I'm currently at:

1. Cannot install from the boot CD.

2. Cannot get the network to work (wireless or wired).

3. Cannot read any CDs from the PCMCIA DVD-ROM (can't mount it).

Thanks for anyhelp you can give.

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## wastedimage

any new info on this?

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## gentuse

http://www.google.com/search?q=linux+portege+3500

The first hit on google, "Toshiba Portege 3500 Linux notes", describes my success...

Both wired and wireless networking work fine for me.

Some others have provided feedback that the Toshiba pcmcia-cdrom (dvdrom?) doesn't work with stock kernels (and gentoo kernels).  I think they said they were able to boot with a Mandrake-based install CD to get their external drives recognized.

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## vai0l0

the google search is not working anymore, could you please post the url for the document?

Thank you 

AleX

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## owensd

Yeah, that Google link doesn't work. Also, I did find some Toshiba 3500 installation notes, tried them, even emailed the author, but none of it worked.

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## chrisashton84

here's where the google search sent me, link works

http://rekl.no-ip.org/3500/

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## mpsii

Ok... the big question... did you get the CD to boot off of the PCMCIA device?

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## chrisashton84

I haven't tried in years, but last time I did gentoo install wasn't able to boot off PCMCIA, at least for the Portege 3500.  However, Mandrake 10 (beta at the time) did boot and I installed gentoo from inside Mandrake.  As far as actually having it boot from the CD in the first place, I  know there was some key to press but I don't recall anymore what it was.  I think it was listed on the recovery cd cases that came with the laptop.

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## mpsii

I have the BIOS set to boot from the CD first. It loads the kernel and then cannot find the root image, so I get dumped into a limited shell.

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## chrisashton84

That sounds like the problem I used to have.  Like I said, try a different distro to boot into then install from inside there.  Mandrake is the only one that just worked of those I tried.  I don't think that knoppix worked, though it's probably improved a lot since then.

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