I recently bought a Toshiba Qosmio F50-111 laptop. Great experience, great sound, great graphics -- a good choice, if you want to buy one.

This article describes how the GNU/Linux system installs on this hardware and gives general notes about performances.

The main characteristics of the Qosmio F50 are:

• Intel Core Duo P8400 @ 2.26MHz
• RAM 4Gb
• NVidia GeForce 9600M GT, 512 Mb
• DD: 2 x 250 GbSata 5400 tr/min

As a GNU/Linux user, I wanted to install some GNU/Linux distributions a few minutes after booting the pre-installed Vista OS for the first time. Here are a few notes about my wanderings, when installing different OSes on this quite new hardware.

The GNU/Linux distributions tested are:
 * Linux Mint 5 x64
 * Gentoo 2008.0 amd64
 * CentOS 5.2 x86ˍ64 (with XEN)

Hardware

Almost all hardware was recognised straight out-of-the-box.The touchy part came with the wireless, described in this different article: Intel Wifi Link5100 and Linux.

The lspci command below gives the hardware as detected by the Mint distribution (Ubuntu based).

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset PCI Express Graphics Port (rev 07)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0649 (rev a1)
0e:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)
14:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 4232
1a:00.0 Multimedia controller: Toshiba America Unknown device 01ba (rev 01)
20:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): JMicron Technologies, Inc. Unknown device 2380
20:00.1 System peripheral: JMicron Technologies, Inc. Unknown device 2382
20:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technologies, Inc. Unknown device 2381
20:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technologies, Inc. Unknown device 2383
20:00.4 System peripheral: JMicron Technologies, Inc. Unknown device 2384

The Intel P8400 dual core CPUs runs at 2.26MHz and has 3M cache. As you can see below from cpuinfo, it has the Intel hardware virtualisation instruction set flag (vmx):

minas ~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor    : 0
vendorˍid    : GenuineIntel
cpu family    : 6
model        : 23
model name    : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     P8400  @ 2.26GHz
stepping    : 6
cpu MHz        : 2267.000
cache size    : 3072 KB
physical id    : 0
siblings    : 2
core id        : 0
cpu cores    : 2
fpu        : yes
fpuˍexception    : yes
cpuid level    : 10
wp        : yes
flags        : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca
cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx
lm constantˍtsc archˍperfmon pebs bts repˍgood pni monitor dsˍcpl vmx
smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4ˍ1 lahfˍlm
bogomips    : 4526.59
clflush size    : 64
cacheˍalignment    : 64
address sizes    : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

The integrated chipset is an Intel ICH9 controller. It is recognised as Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) by the Mint system.

The internal network card is a Gigabit Realtek RTL 8169, recognised as RTL8168c/8111c with the r8169 driver:
[   72.649400] r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.2LK loaded
[   72.649880] eth0: RTL8168c/8111c at 0xffffc20001046000, 00:1e:ec:3e:26:70, XID 3c4000c0 IRQ 505

Applications

Performances were always amazing. For my everyday usage I have almost no dead time, and no blocking at all.

Compiz and OpenGL run fluently. Gimp launchs in 2 seconds, Eclipse in less than 8 seconds.

The Harman/Kardon speakers have a really good sound, even with a high level of ouput.

I've tried a few games on Windows (Counter Strike, Quake 3 Arena). They all are fluid even with with maximum resolution and details. The only thing I can complain about is the Vista boot time, but it's not that often that I dare suffering it. ;)

The most resources-consuming applications I usually run are virtualisation and builds.The Intel hardware emulation is activated on most modern distributions kernels, and virtual machines are fast.

VirtualBox, VMware and qemu could run seamlessly.