Toshiba Dynabook Portege X30L-J

Linux Mint 20.1 with Mate desktop

Technicians manual

v20210407

by Dion Patelis

Intention

The intention of this document is to create a manual for the standard computer user wanting to use Linux.

ONE machine – ONE operating system – ONE manual.

Version

See Engineers Manual.

Tech manual

Is the setup of systems which the final user will see in the User Manual.

Linux issue

The issue with Linux is that it is too configurable and when the standard user talks to Linux Nerds they get too much info and too many options. I think the standard home and business user wants a system which is holistically a machine and OS with a manual. Like Puri.sm or Apple I am trying to create a system where the machine and OS are one design.

Because:

I am not as determined as Puri.sm or Apple to build from scratch and

the only reason I’d NOT bought one of the Puri.sm machines Is the warranty time difficulty between Australia and USA

I have taken the path of buying a 3rd party machine and trying to get as close to the unified system ideal as possible.

Why this machine?

I had a very reliable Toshiba before;

My old boss from 20 years ago still stands by and sells Toshiba;

Toshiba has a 3 year manufacturer warranty as standard;

Warranty covered Australia wide and most likely in most countries;

Backlit keyboard;

Metal chassis – Magnesium Alloy for durability;

Hi res screen;

Hopefully reasonable graphics card;

RJ-45 connector;

Reasonable ports – USB, Thunderbolt, STANDARD HDMI, MicroSD card reader, earphone.

Toshiba appear to build to industry standards and not make up some propriety new mangled standard like Apple, Acer or IBM. --- You here me out there manufacturers!!! If manufacturers make proprietary rubbish with no manuals and parts that are designed to fail so I have to come back to you to buy them, I will do everything in my power to buy somewhere else and tell everyone else to buy something else!!

Highly likely to be Linux compatible.

Improvement suggestions

Build in the PSU. 90% of laptop users cart their PSU around with them. Thus all the wires hanging off the PSU WILL break and it adds to the weight anyway. Reduce the weight by building the PSU into the chassis as a separate replaceable unit. NO extra wire from the PSU to the Laptop.

Make a magnetic IEC adaptor. For the PSU. Apple did the magnetic connector years ago. They did a horrible job of it, but it’s still better than the rest of the manufacturers. IEC plugs are everywhere. Make a separate PSU which connects magnetically to the chassis, but streamlined into the chassis. If someone trips over the cable it will still come off. It sits smooth with the chassis so fits into a laptop sleve.

IEC connectors to the PSU. They are everywhere so there is no need to carry any extra cables in transit.

12 volts through the IEC connector. Auto sensing switch mode PSUs have been around for ages. Add 12v to the 120v and 240v auto sensing.

Mechanical replaceable switches on the camera, microphone, wifi & GPS.

A non back lit monochrome LCD screen like an e-reader except as a laptop. Colour would be nice, but I’ve not checked the colour e-readers as yet. The eye strain on a non back lit screen I find to be substantially less. It would also make a mammoth power saving.

Waterproof keyboard?? It’s 2021 people. One of the most common ways a notebook PC is damaged it through liquids. Where is the waterproof keyboard or I should as whole machine?

Singe click on a filename to go into edit filename mode instead of right clicking and selecting ‘Rename’.

When double clicking on the column divider in Caja, the column expands or contracts to the width of the max length file name like IOS or windows XP.

Drag a file with the right mouse button held and where it drops another menu comes up with the options:

Create link here

Copy

Move

Extract here.

Pinch zoom working as standard

Found an interim solution here:

Touch pad two finger rotate as standard.

Caja file browser

Column browser like Mac for Caja with the preview panel as the last panel.

After doing a search when a single click on a file is performed, show the path somewhere without having to go into

right click → ‘Properties’

Description

This document outlines the setup of a Toshiba Dynabook Portege X3.0L-J notebook computer running Linux Mint version 20.1.

The machine

Taken from:

Menu → System Reports → System Information.

System:  Kernel: 5.8.0-48-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A Desktop: MATE 1.24.0 wm: marco

dm: LightDM Distro: Linux Mint 20.1 Ulyssa base: Ubuntu 20.04 focal

Machine:  Type: Laptop

System:                 Dynabook

product:                 PORTEGE X30L-J v: PCR10A-02P003 serial: <filter>

Chassis:                 type: 10 v: Version 1.0 serial: <filter>

Mobo:                 Dynabook model: A010D/0001 v:

                                Version A0 serial: <filter> UEFI: Dynabook

                 v: Version 1.90 date: 02/04/2021

Battery:                  ID-1: BAT1 charge: 37.7 Wh condition: 54.1/53.1 Wh (102%)

                                volts: 15.7/15.4

                                model: G71C000M8221 serial: <filter> status: Discharging

CPU:                  Topology: Quad Core model: 11th Gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 bits: 64

                                type: MT MCP

                 arch: Tiger Lake rev: 1 L2 cache: 8192 KiB

                 flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx                                                 bogomips: 38707

                 Speed: 851 MHz min/max: 400/4200 MHz

                                Core speeds (MHz): 1: 608 2: 969 3: 3480 4: 1269

                 5: 1080 6: 666 7: 3437 8: 1064

Graphics:  Device-1: Intel driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0 chip ID: 8086:9a49

                 Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.9

                                driver: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa

                 compositor: compiz resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz

                 OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel Xe Graphics (TGL GT2) v: 4.6 Mesa 20.2.6

                 direct render: Yes

Audio:                  Device-1: Intel driver: snd_hda_intel

                                v: kernel bus ID: 00:1f.3 chip ID: 8086:a0c8

Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.8.0-48-generic

Network:  Device-1:                 Intel

                                                                driver: iwlwifi v: kernel

                                                                port: 3000 bus ID: 00:14.3 chip ID: 8086:a0f0

                                                 IF: wlo1 state: up mac: <filter>

                 Device-2:                 Intel Ethernet I219-V

                                                                driver: e1000e v: 3.2.6-k port: efa0 bus ID: 00:1f.6

                                                 chip ID: 8086:15fc

                                                 IF: eno2 state: down mac: <filter>

Drives:                  Local Storage: total: 931.51 GiB used: 492.28 GiB (52.8%)

                 ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1

                                vendor: Crucial model: CT1000P1SSD8 size: 931.51 GiB

                 speed: 31.6 Gb/s lanes: 4 serial: <filter>

                                Partition: ID-1: /

                                size: 915.40 GiB used: 492.27 GiB (53.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2

USB:                  Hub: 1-0:1 info: Full speed (or root)

                                Hub ports: 1 rev: 2.0

                                chip ID: 1d6b:0002

                 Hub: 2-0:1 info: Full speed (or root)

                                Hub ports: 4 rev: 3.1 chip ID: 1d6b:0003

                 Hub: 3-0:1 info: Full speed (or root)

                                Hub ports: 12 rev: 2.0 chip ID: 1d6b:0002

Device-1:                 3-5:2 info: Siliconworks SiW HID Touch Controller type: HID

                 driver: hid-generic,hid-multitouch,usbhid rev: 2.0 chip ID: 5348:1201

Device-2:                 3-6:3 info: Chicony Web Camera - HD type:

Video driver: uvcvideo rev: 2.0

                 chip ID: 04f2:b6f0

Device-3:                 3-10:4 info: Intel type: Bluetooth driver: btusb rev: 2.0 chip ID: 8087:0026

                                 Hub: 4-0:1 info: Full speed (or root)

                                Hub ports: 4 rev: 3.1 chip ID: 1d6b:0003

Sensors:                  System Temperatures: cpu: 53.0 C mobo: 53.0 C

                 Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A

Install

Once you’ve acquired your X30 you’ll need to download the image file from linuxmint.com. From here you will create a boot thumb drive from that .iso image using the installation guide.

Stick the thumb drive in the USB port and turn on the computer. Keep pressing F2 to get into the BIOS.

In the BIOS you can choose the boot order. Select to boot from the thumb drive via USB. The machine should now boot into the Linux Mint OS running from the thumb drive. It will have an option there to install the OS. Choose it and select the default options.

Installing the correct Kernel

See .

LAN driver

e1000e-3.8.4.tar.gz

Available from either:

https://dionpatelis.com/mint-20-1-desktop-on-x30l-j/

or

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/15817

Instructions from intel:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005480/network-and-i-o/ethernet-products.html

Summarised into:

Prerequisites

apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

apt-get install gcc make

You may need to perform a general update and restart before the next steps.               

Download current e1000e package from Download Center. Move the base driver tar file to the directory of your choice.

For example, use

/home/<USERNAME>/e1000e or /usr/local/src/e1000e.

Untar/unzip the archive, where <x.x.x> is the version number for the driver tar file:

 tar zxf e1000e-<x.x.x>.tar.gz

Change to the driver src directory, where <x.x.x> is the version number for the driver tar:

 cd e1000e-<x.x.x>/src/

Compile the driver module:

 make install               

The binary installs as:

/lib/modules/<KERNEL VERSION>/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.ko

The install location listed above is the default. Location may differ for various Linux distributions.

Load the module using either the insmod or modprobe command:

 modprobe e1000e insmod e1000e               

Note: You can use the insmod command for 2.6 kernels if you specify the full path to the driver module. For example:

insmod /lib/modules/<KERNEL VERSION>/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.ko

With 2.6 based kernels, make sure that older e1000e drivers are removed from the kernel before you load the new module:

 rmmod e1000e; modprobe e1000e               

Assign an IP address to the interface by entering the following, where <x> is the interface number:

 ifconfig eth<x> <IP_address>

Verify that the interface works. Enter the following, where <IP_address> is the IP address for another machine on the same subnet as the interface you're testing:

 ping <IP_address>

Audio driver

Quoted from forum thread:

“As I said the sound driver I was running was sof-audio-pci, which had no normal firmware at the moment.

I searched nearly 3 hours trying to solve this headache and finally found the solution, just disable this "sof" driver and fall back to intel:

Do:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Change

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash snd_hda_intel.dmic_detect=0"

Then do:

sudo update-grub

and Reboot.

You can check if soundcards are detected with:

aplay -l

Thread reference:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1243369/sound-card-not-detected-ubuntu-20-04-sof-audio-pci

Fixing the suspend issue – Part I

Out of the box when you try click suspend the screen will go black and then it will come back to life. To fix this load the correct kernel as usually it’s a graphics driver issue.

To check if you have a graphics driver loaded:

inxi -Fxxxrz

It will throw back:

Graphics:

Device-1: Intel driver: N/A bus ID: 00:02.0 chip ID: 8086:9a49

Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.9 driver: fbdev unloaded: modesetting,vesa compositor: compiz v: 0.9.14.1 resolution: 1920x1080~77Hz

OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 11.0.0 256 bits) v: 4.5 Mesa 20.2.6

compat-v: 3.1 direct render: Yes

showing that the graphics driver is not loaded.

User SMG on the Mint forums said:

“Given how new your processor is, I would first recommend switching to the 5.8 kernel which is available in Update Manager.

Open Update Manager. Select View > Linux Kernels and click Continue. Make sure 5.8 is selected on the left panel and then click the top-most option on the right panel. An "Install" button will appear. Install the kernel and then reboot for it to become active.

Let's see if that loads the i915 driver, modesetting, and the Intel renderer.”

I did so and now it works. The screen turns off:

Graphics:

Device-1: Intel driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0 chip ID: 8086:9a49

Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.9 driver: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa compositor: compiz v: 0.9.14.1 resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz

OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel Xe Graphics (TGL GT2) v: 4.6 Mesa 20.2.6 direct render: Yes

Forum reference:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=346619

Suspend issue – part II

Laptop wont stay in suspend.

For a list of devices that wakeup the computer:

 cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

The 4 letter codes are specific to manufacturer so are a bit hard to figure out.

You can grep in

 cat /proc/bus/input/devices

for the codes shown in

 cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

For the Portege I found that if I disabled:

 RP08

it appears to put the system to sleep except the screen is like in a black on state with a non blinking cursor. This concerns me as it would still be using power.

To disable

 echo RP08 | tee /proc/acpi/wakeup

Forum reference:

 https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=261465&start=20

Compiz – the ultimate window manager

By far the smoothest window manager I’ve ever used. It looks like it’s there out of the box with Linux Mint, but it just never works.

(If the Linux Mint team are reading this, could you please make a big fat button in the ‘Control Centre’ to set the following up automatically? Other than that, you guys have made an awesome OS, thank you and keep up the fantastic work.)

Mac OSX took some Compiz components and added them to make a very slick OS (Up to OSX 10.6.9)

Setup

Linux Mint Mate 19.3 & 20.1

It needs to be setup in Mint Mate

Go to a terminal session for the current user.

compiz --replace

then you can configure everything else from the 'Control Centre' menu item.

To make it start automatically for that user:

Menu → type 'startup applications'

Add the

compiz --replace

command

Logout and in again.

Voila!

Wobbly windows

I love wobbly windows as it makes the desktop feel organic. Also because my eyesight is diminishing due to age, the Zoom in ‘Enhanced Zoom Desktop’ is great. I’ve set to <alt>Button4 and <alt> Button5 which is <alt> scroll to zoom in and out smoothly.

Desktop switcher cube

The ‘Enable Rotate Cube’ Compiz setting I’ve set to <ctrl><alt> left and right arrows makes desktop switching impressive and easy for the brain to handle.

Grid

The grid system allows a user to grab the title bar of a window and drag it into the side, top or corner of the screen causing it to resize.

These settings are managed in

Control Centre → Compiz Config → Grid.

Shortcut keys

<Alt> key and then one of the following:

q,w,e

a,s,d

z,x,c

with <Alt><Shift>s to restore to the original window.

Shift switcher

The user manual shows → Switching Between Windows → Between the same application.

For switching between applications:

→ Enable Shift Switcher → Next Window Key (Group) → set to <Alt>grave

which is equivalent to

<Alt>tilde

or

<Alt>~

Keyboard

It’s keystrokes are not as smooth as a lot of other keyboards I’ve tried, but I can see how maybe some would prefer it.

Size is nice and having ‘page up’ & ‘page down’ is excellent.

Water proof or splash resistant ???

Screen

The screen seems a little flexi for my liking initially. However it may be fine. To get a laptop under 1kg is quite a feat. As much as I liked the durability of a toughened glass screen by Apple, it’s glossy reflection drove me mad on many an occasion, thus a matte screen is far nicer to work on. After 10 years the glass screen on the MacBook still looks new. We’ll see how the X30 screen stands up to the test of time. The Toshiba did come with a soft cloth to keep between the screen and the keyboard though. And in Toshibas defence, the first Tecra A40 I had between ~2005 and 2010 I did not put anything between the screen and the keyboard when closed and in transit it did scratch the screen, and thus the MacBook Pro always had a piece of foam between screen and keyboard in transit without fail.

Touch screen                               

This works out of the box. In Brave web browser it scrolls in all directions and pinch zoom works beautifully. Just can’t get pinch zoom working with the touchpad.

Brightness               

Fn F7 & F8 not working out of the box.

Using brightness applet on panel at the moment till I find a resolution.

Have set

<Alt>n

and

<Alt>m

as keyboard shortcuts for brightness.

To install:

apt install light

Add the user to /etc/sudoers so they don't have to type a password when issuing a sudo command. Type

visudo

to edit this file.

Add

%username% ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

to the end of the file.

Insert your username where it says

%username%

above:

then in the

Command Centre → Keyboard shortcuts

add the command

sudo light -A 5 and

sudo light -U 5

for 2 different key combinations being

<Alt>n

and

<Alt>m

This is fine for a single user for the moment. I will have to write a better version than this so that it’s only sudo on the light command itself.

Preferably the new Toshiba BIOS will just make the original Fn keys work.

Taken from the forum  post:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=347211&p=2001741#p2001741

Either bios update or something in X11 dir in the radeon.conf file

Disabling the IME

Disabling the Intel Management Engine. Refer to blogs at Puri.sm

ToDos

Setup inertia scrolling on the trackpad like OSX. So you can flick and it keeps scrolling.

Check microphone.

Get all the function keys working as Toshiba has designed.

Get double click on the top of any given window to maximise working every time, not just sometimes.

Get virtual machines running.

Types of this document

The exports of this document is always done from the latest version of LibreOffice.

The .epub version:

File → Export As → Export Directly as EPUB

File → Export → Select from the bottom RHS in the drop down menu XHTML → Save.

Glossary

~ (tilde)

=

Approximately equal to

OS

=

Operating System

LAN

=

Local Area Network

RHS

=

Right Hand Side

LHS

=

Left Hand Side

Forks

Feel free to fork these manuals. They are GNU licence.

Notes

The base point for this information is at dionpatelis.com/linux

Contribute

If this manual has helped you and you feel you want to contribute, That or motivate me to update this manual and write other ones. Please do so at

https://www.patreon.com/dionpatelis