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Workaround for Suse 10.0 on Toshiba m45 s355
In earlier articles I posted the pros and cons of Suse 10.0 on this newer Toshiba Satellite Laptop M45-S355. One of the only real gotchas (besides the memory leaks of some apps), is that the wireless and ethernet wouldn't work at the same time if acpi is enabled. Apparently it's an issue with Toshiba's buggy ACPI chipset in this (and some other) model of laptop. :-( That combined with certain NIC/Wifi Drivers included in the kernel distributed with Suse 10.0 (and many other distros) kernel version 2.6.13-15.7-default. I was getting by with acpi=off in the kernel load line in grub menu.1st, but of course that disabled all power management. At the time I couldn't find any other information to help out. Now I've found Novell's buglist has this listed for this specific model laptop, and someone found a work around there, but they went with a whole recompile anyway. There are several options to resolve this issue now.
One is to download a newer kernel, and install/enable the module sky2 instead of the older (current) sk98lin driver. It's an issue between sk98lin and ohci1394 and acpi and kernel release.
You could go through all that, and of course recompiling the kernel is one of the wonderful joys of the open source world (and I don't mean that sarcastically, it's a great freedom, when you're ready for it, and really lets you learn more about "how it all works") is compiling out the crap you don't need, and making the code optimized for your specific system. This makes the system faster, and more specific to your own needs. When you're up to it, go for it!
Anyhow, if you're not up to that, then there's an easy work around (if and until Novell releases an update fixing this via the update manager YOU).
Simply edit your Bootloader to add the following line to your Grub Menu.1st option after your kernel options on the same line:
irqpoll pci=usepirqmask
So, the file /boot/grub/menu.1st
will have a line looking something similar to this:
###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SUSE LINUX 10.0
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda8 vga=0x314 selinux=0 resume=/dev/sda5 splash=silent showopts irqpoll pci=usepirqmask
initrd /boot/initrd
Then save and reboot. Now the power management works, nic's work etc. I'm not sure if there are any issues with using this work around, since I only implemented it mere minutes ago, but Novell changed the bug status to resolved via this workaround, but also stated they were going to the newer sky2 driver in Suse 10.1.
Anyhow, hopefully if you were struggling with power management issues, this will give you some options to try out.
Have fun!
If any issues come up, I'll post an update. ;-)
Here's some relevant links:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=139603
http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=18434
http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=27677
