This page is the beginning of a (hopefully) extensive set of support resources for using FreeBSD on the Toshiba Portege line of notebook computers. The first draft will be nothing more than a long list of resources. As I have time I will beat it into a more organized shape.

I purchased (ordered) my portege 7020CT about February 26, 1999. It didn't arrive till around March 29. As these are very new machines I suppose it was to be expected. FreeBSD 4.0-current installed cleanly and runs well. The Toshiba part# is PAP702U-T2W8 (installed with winblows/98).

I also purchased the DVD network dock (2 actually, one for home and one for the office). It has a Toshiba part# of PA2722U. It includes a DVD ROM drive (CD-ROM compatible), as well as a 1.44MB floppy and Intel 10/100TX network adapter. The fxp0 driver works well with the builtin network card. The CD-ROM compatibility also works, as I was able to run sysinstall and load packages from the 3.1R FreeBSD cd after installing a 4.0-current SNAP via NFS.

I did a quick look at the partitions with the w98 FDISK program and concluded that there was only one partition covering the entire disk (with the usual small unused block of sectors at the end of the disk). Now I am not entirely convinced that the block at the end was a "hibernation" partition, and that I shot myself in the foot in the following steps. Would someone who has just purchased this machine please RECORD the info from w98's FDISK before proceeding with the install? It might also be nice to boot the FreeBSD install floppies and proceed as far as the "Partition Editor" to record a view of the virgin disk from FreeBSD's point of view.

I then ran the w98 DEFRAG program, followed by the 'fips' program from the FreeBSD tools directory. This step went without incident. See the 'fips' doc for details on this procedure.

Finally I booted install floppies from the FreeBSD 4.0-19990306-SNAP set and did the usual install. As the docking station provides an Intel lan chipset, I didn't have to deal with the PC card issues. The fxp0 driver recognized the hardware and allowed me to do an NFS install.

After the initial install was complete I rebooted and added several packages from a 3.1R cd. Again, I was relieved to find that the DVD drive in the docking station was properly recognized as a CD-ROM by FreeBSD.

I had to unpack XFree-3.3.3.1 manually as the custom install failed to do so (I usually have this problem, I must not setup my link properly). It took several tries with the sysinstall/XF86Setup configurator to get the XF86Config file correctly built, but I eventually got the system working @ 1024x768 truecolor (24bits).

I haven't tried to setup sound yet, other than to look in the usual places for mention of the ESS ES19xx chips, of which I found none...