Sunday, November 7, 2010

Set up Toshiba L650 laptops after ubuntu installation

This article explains how to set up device drivers after installing Ubuntu in Toshiba laptops. Most probably Ubuntu will not support LAN, WiFi, Bluetooth and in some systems, anomaly in working of fan, battery are reported. Some of my problems like LAN setup, WiFi and Bluetooth have overridden and my battery is still showing some problems. I hope these instructions will be helpful for Toshiba Laptop users. Note that this article is a "how I did" type article rather than a "how to".
Some models of Toshiba Satellite are preloaded with Windows and some are not. In pre-installed models, try to make the system dual boot. There are a lot of tutorials for that and in Ubuntu, this is pretty easy compared to other distros. Anyway, I assume you have Toshiba system with a fresh Ubuntu installed. I used Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on by Toshiba L650-i5310.
Setting up Ethernet
My ethernet card was from Atheros Communications. A driver for Atheros is available from http://linuxwireless.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6 . Download and unzip the file. Then in terminal, cd into that folder. Then type the following code:
scripts/driver-select atheros
make
sudo make install

Then reboot the system.
Setting up Wireless
My Wireless LAN card was from Broadcom Corporation. The driver is readily available from ubuntu repository.
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
echo wl | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Reboot the system.
Setting up Bluetooth
In bluetooth, I did nothing in Ubuntu and I installed a bluetooth driver from Toshiba in Windows 7. After that incident, my Ubuntu also start detecting bluetooth adapter and don't know how this happened.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

My best guess is that installing the windows driver probably unlocked or did something hardware related to the card which made it available in Linux too.

Ramon said...

Hi!
Perhaps you would know how to make the Toshiba laptops boot up and shut down faster with Ubuntu 10.04 installed. I've tried an infinity of things and none works. Some help will be appreciated.

Cheers

Tom Varghese Konikkara said...

Reply to Ramon
In my Toshiba satellite l650, Ubuntu 10.04 is just smart enough to boot within a few seconds. It is faster than windows 7. I just didn't understand what happened in you case. What about windows in your PC?

Tom Varghese Konikkara said...

Reply to Anonymous:
That may be correct. When I disables Bluetooth and WiFi in windows 7, it become locked in Ubuntu also and to unlock it I need to return back to Windows again. I think the reason is why Toshiba provides software to control in low level unfortunately for windows only. A similar package from linux hackers named -'toshset' module is not working in my PC.

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