This is the second part of a series of posts about my experience with linux on a Linux on a Toshiba Satellite A300 11X. For par one please read here.

My second try with linux on this laptop was with Debian Lenny, using one of the weekly builds (September 29th). Debian installed well and everything apparently worked. After a closer look I started to notice some problems. I could not adjust the brightness which was very high and the system fans seemed to work with more speed and noise than with Vista. These where problems that I think could and can be easily worked out, but I did not have the time to do it. The reason was simple: No wireless.

After a lot of googling I realized that this wireless card ( Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG ) didn’t have drivers in Debian kernel and I could not find a way to use the driver… This was a major set back since I really wanted to use Debian on my laptop as I use on my desktop.

As for all the suspend/hibernate stuff, resuming after suspend did not work out-of-the-box but hibernate did work well

One of the good things about Debian was the open source driver for the ATI Mobility Radeo 3470 wich worked very well (but I had to edit xorg.conf setting the driver as ATI) setting the right screen resolution. This did not happen with my next and current distro that I use on the laptop right now but is a good sign for it’s next release 🙂

More to come on the next post about linux on a Toshiba Satellite A300 11X.