New laptop - Toshiba Satellite R945-P440

Bought that this weekend. The big attraction? A bit more RAM, more
cores, and even more battery life, at the same pricepoint as my old
Acer Aspire 4810T. The downside? 6Gb instead of 8, and some
Toshiba/Microsoft trickery.

I had looked at some discounted variations on HP Pavilions dv6 models,
but read that they supported UEFI, and you needed a Windows install
disk to get around it.

So I buy the Toshiba, turn it on, stick in a Debian net-install disk
and... it boots to Windows. Try it again, but no hot-key to access the
boot order or the BIOS. WTF? I wanted to avoid booting to Windows 7.

So I google and find that the BIOS settings are accessed by a Windows
app (!!!) that Toshiba supplies. I use that app to change the boot
order, and then double-check the rest of the settings, and left them
alone.

Of course, this being Windows, they have to waste a couple partitions
(1 Gb andn 12 Gb) on system-restore, and the amount of "volume
shrinkage" I could get on the 750Gb drive was only 350 Gb. Figgers.
So I blow away Windows, leaving the restore partitions just in case.

The Debian install goes pretty smooth, except for the following issues:

- Took me awhile to get my fluxbox startup to work right. I started
with the Slim window-manager, ended up with a more
standards-complient one called LightDM, and got that worked out.
- Network manager wouldn't let me connect. I ended up finding an
obscure policy file that I had to install in /etc/polkit-1 or some
such directory.
- The system would freeze HARD after some minutes of using the UI.
It would run a long time just copying stuff, but the UI fairly
consistently froze. Bummer. Linux 3.2 kernel.

I finally ended up downloading Linux 3.5.2 (the latest stable release),
and configured that and built and installed it using Debian's
kernel-package. That turned out to be pretty straightforward, though we
shall see how well it works with the VirtualBox package. At any rate, I
was able to exercise audio and video playing Big Buck Bunny and doing a
bunch of other stuff without freezing.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this machine for someone who wanted a
hassle-free Linux install. I'm disappointed in Toshiba's approach to
this new piece of hardware. And I wish Debian would track the latest
stable kernel releases.

YOU are the one constantly showing off about this transaction
manager. You are the one citing this particular project YOU created that
pisses all over WIndows based ones. So YOU cough up the open source for
this.
You wont of course, because you're a smelly cellar dwelling sad packer
who has never contributed a thing but expects everyone else to spoon
feed you. Your history as a fraud a liar is there for all to see.