I installed the source based Gentoo linux distribution on the Toshiba
AX/2528PDS after having difficulty with fan and acpi on this laptop
with Suse 9.2 and Fedora Core 3 on the machine. Running Suse 9.2 or
Fedora Core 3, this machine would heat up and eventually crash,
particularly when running high computational loads (eg Maple
calculations), as the fan speed apparently did not adjust according to
the processor temperature.
Perhaps this problem could have been solved by recompiling the kernel
in Suse 9.2 or in FC3, but I did not pursue this course after finding that
with Gentoo the problem disappeared altogether. In fact the
cooling fan on this laptop worked correctly once I booted from the
Gentoo installation cd, and has continued to do so thereafter.

To install Gentoo I closely followed the instructions in the
(excellently documented) manual which is at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml
Since the machine is equipped with a fast processor, it was no
difficulty to use the "stage 1" installation -- that is the option of
compiling the whole system from source, as explained in the handbook.
The make.conf file used for the compile of the system is attached, but
the reader should note that the mirrors in this file should be set
using the mirrorselect tool.

Also, the installation differed from the recommendation in the Gentoo
handbook and used the journalled xfs file system for the /boot and the
/var, /opt, /home /usr, and root partitions. This did not seem to
cause any problems
especially as the laptop has a reliable power supply.

For this installation, the gentoo-sources kernel which requires manual kernel
configuration was used, rather than the gen-kernel which attempts to
automatically detect hardware.
The kernel configuration was helped by using lspci, although it took a
number of iterations or attempts to arrive at the kernel configuration
in the attached file. The use of toshiba kernel modules on the
Dynabook AX/2528PDS is not recommended -- the modules do not work, and
when I made the error of compiling these into the kernel, the machine did
not boot at all. According to the documentation the module in question
requires a Toshiba bios, which it seems this laptop does not have.

To configure X11 I followed the instructions at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml, using

#Xorg-configure

This configuration worked fine, except for problems with the Japanese
keyboard. For the Japanese keyboard, it was necessary to set this
manually in the xorg.conf file as follows:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "jp106"
Option "XkbLayout" "jp"
EndSection

The full xorg.conf file is attached.

Once the system was up and running, I installed the bootsplash, and
for this there was some difficulty configuring the kernel options so
that it worked correctly (see the attached grub.conf file).

Remarks.

(i) The useflags in make.conf are chosen as:
USE="X gtk -gnome -kde -qt acpi -apm tetex perl nls cjk unicode cdr pcmcia"
to include cjk and nls (chinesejapanesekorean) and (nonlatinscripts)
so as to later use SCIM for Japanese character input. See
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=263174
for details.
Also I set -gnome and -kde since I am using icewm and xfce4 for my
desktop, as kde and gnome have far more features than needed here.

(ii) Sleep and suspend have not been tested. There is
documentation for power management at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml
but none of it is implimented in this installation.

(iii) According to the output of lspci, the AX/2528PDS is equipped
with ATI Radeon Mobility 7000 IGP graphics card. The procedure to
enable DRI was as follows:

(a) Kernel configuration:
# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

(b) make menuconfig options for DRI:
Processor type and features --->
<*> MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support
Character devices --->
<M> Enhanced Real Time Clock Support
<M> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)
<M> ATI Chipset Support
< > Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)

(c) Compile kernel:
#cd /usr/src/linux
#make && make modules_install

(d) Copy the new kernel image and the System.map to the boot partition,
and update the grub.conf as per the examples in
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=7

(e) Install X11-DRM:
#emerge x11-drm

(f) Check contents of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
...
Section "Module"
Load "extmod"
Load "dri"
Load "dbe"
Load "record"
Load "xtrap"
Load "glx"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
EndSection
...
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
...
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Radeon VE/7000 QY"
BusID "PCI:1:5:0"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPSize" "64"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "True"
Option "PageFlip" "True"
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
EndSection
...
Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

(f) Edit the contents of /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 to
include the following four lines for automatic loading of kernel
modules at boot:
rtc
agpgart
ati_agp
drm

(g) Reboot into the new kernel and startx. Test DRI using
#glxgears
and
# glxinfo | less

(h) Additional references for the implimentation of DRI are at
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/dri-howto.xml

(iv) Output of lspci is:
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device cab3 (rev 05)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 340M]
0000:00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller
#1 (rev 01)
0000:00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller
#2 (rev 01)
0000:00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc EHCI USB Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SMBus (rev 18)
0000:00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4349
0000:00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 434c
0000:00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4342
0000:00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP150
AC'97 Audio Controller
0000:00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc IXP AC'97 Modem (rev 01)
0000:01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon
Mobility 7000 IGP
0000:02:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus
Controller (rev 02)
0000:02:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
0000:02:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB21
IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)