Waxing Cerebral

A place for my notes on the things I've done to get Xubuntu Feisty (Ubuntu is the same procedure) running from scratch on my Toshiba Tecra P5 laptop (PTS53A-02F01D).

Started by trying to boot into the LiveCD. This failed with:
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
This message is a symptom of any boot problems - after some figuring out it turned out that there were problems with the cd module.
To fix, restart and on the boot screen, push F6. Edit the boot command ('e'), add:
break=top
(type 'b') to boot
This causes booting to stop early in the boot process (I think) and lets you type in stuff. When the prompt comes up, type:
modprobe piix
exit
This loads the module required to read the cd.

Booting then seems to continue happily but eventually it just freezes with text on the screen. This is because it doesn't recognise the video driver properly. We need to use the xorg default driver for now.
Pushing Ctrl+Alt+F1 takes you to the single user login.
sudo -s
vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf - (This uses the editor 'vi'. If you're not familiar with this, use 'i' to change to edit mode, 'esc' to come back out of edit mode, 'x' to delete a letter (when not in edit mode), ':w' to save (write) the file and ':q' to quit.)
change driver "nv" to "vesa" then exit
/etc/init.d/gdm restart
And Ubuntu should boot!

So play with it, enjoy the LiveCD, and when ready, double click 'install' on the desktop.

At first it couldn't manage to partition the hard drive, and unfortunately killed Windows :(.
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ONLY DO THIS SECTION IF IT CAN NOT WRITE THE PARTITIONS - THIS WILL KILL WINDOWS.

I managed to get the disk manageable again by running:
mkfs /dev/sda
Now I could partition with:
cfdisk
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Congratulations, you should now be booting into Ubuntu :)

CD
So, in order to get continued cd support, we need to tell Ubuntu to load piix each time it boots. To do this, open a terminal and type:
sudo vi /etc/modules
To the end of this file, add:
piix

Graphics
I had difficulty setting up the nvidia graphics driver and really wanted the goods. So I found envy. Brilliant. Get it, run it. It downloads and installs the correct nvidia proprietary video drivers.

Sound
Initially I had a hardware problem so couldn't get sound at all which was very frustrating. Now that the hardware's fixed, it's fine. (Antony Williams also has a great script for automatically getting the latest alsa development drivers, should you need them.) Currently, plugging in headphones has no impact (i.e. sound still comes out of speakers and headphones are dead), so will update here when I resolve.
EDIT (Feb 08): I now have headphones sound as of alsa v1.0.16. You can find out your current alsa version by running:

1. I need to mute the main speakers manually when I plug in the headphones
2. Microphone doesn't work, either built-in or plugged-in