Toshiba Portege R700 / R705 hardware compatibility with Ubuntu 10.04

[Nitye]

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I am planning to buy a Toshiba Portege R700 or a R705 for my business purpose. The R705 has almost same components as compared to R700 it is just the difference of some features like Bluetooth, express slot, fingerprint reader and 5400rpm drive. Basically I want to know whether the two laptops are compatible with the Ubuntu 10.04 or not.

I hardly found any sources on internet which showed any support information for Ubuntu on the Toshiba Portege R700 and R705. So I want people to post their experiences using Ubuntu with the Toshiba laptops. I don’t want to know about the laptop features and description; I purely want people to discuss about Ubuntu with above mentioned two laptops.

[Samaria]

I have encountered some issues with the battery indicator; I think the battery capacity and the charge levels of the laptop are not recorded properly by the Ubuntu OS. The full charge predicts that I can use my laptop for at least 3-4 hours but when the laptop shows the warning of 5mins of battery life remaining even then I am able to use my laptop for another 1 hour. “Ubuntu Power Statics” which is accessible from the battery icon only gives an average of 25%-30% accurate prediction which is less than the ideal prediction.

I don’t think that this issue is in any way related to the laptop because despite of all this problems I am able to use my laptop for at least 3-4 hours but it is difficult to make out when it will go off or when it is fully charge. I don’t know if there is any solution for this or not but one thing is for sure that the indicators are not working fine. Tried to find solution for this but was unsuccessful.

[Sasuke Uchiha]

Webcam works very fine with Ubuntu, the hardware is easily detected. It even works fine with Skype I have tested it. You can easily adjust the resolution and brightness settings correctly. I tried to assign two dedicated hardware buttons one for email and other for web in windows via keyboard shortcuts but they are working as the same button I am unable to understand why is it happening? Most of the Fn modifiers are working fine and even the Volume keys, mute and number pad is working perfectly. Wi-Fi key only turns the Bluetooth module On or Off.

[Anjan1990]

There are touchpad issues with Ubuntu in every laptop so same goes over here. It generally works well but the two finger scrolling is turned off you can easily turn it on by running a simple syncline settings on login. I want my touch pad to detect the two fingers scrolling so I have found out a code that will enable the two fingers scrolling on the startup itself. The code is as follows:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 10
synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=5
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=48

There is a keyboard shortcut and even a dedicated button on the keyboard to disable the touchpad but it doesn’t works.

[Mahalingam]

After the startup on the resume the Display gets locked and it cannot be changed through the function keys so I have found a solution to change the brightness via Fn-keys but I don’t know how to do it using gnome power manager. So below are the set of codes which will allow you to change the brightness using the brightness keys.
You will have to create the files “tosh-brightness-down” and “tosh-brightness-up” in /etc/acpi/events you can do this by using sudo <and the editor of your choice or the one which you like.

Code for “tosh-brightness-down”:

event=hkey VALZ 00000001 00000140
action=/etc/acpi/tosh-brn-down.sh

Code for “tosh-brightness-up”:

event=hkey VALZ 00000001 00000141
action=/etc/acpi/tosh-brn-up.sh

Now you have to add the following to file to etc/acpi/(the parent directory of the previous files)
Tosh-brn-down-sh:

#!/bin/sh
test -f /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants || exit 0

. /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants
DeviceConfig
toshset -bl on

Tosh-brn-up-sh(it is similar to the above file but it will be better if we keep both the files seperate):

#!/bin/sh
test -f /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants || exit 0

. /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants
DeviceConfig
toshset -bl on

Using this set of codes your Fn keys will be working if anyone knows any better trick or solution then let me know about it.