SUSE 8.2 on Portege 3480ct


I recently have had great success with suse 8.2 on a portege 3480ct. Here is
what I learned that might be of use to others.

acpi=off should be passed at boot time. This can be done permenantly in
YaST2. This allows apm to work in properly and lets you change power modes
with the Fn-F2 key combination. apm needs to be setuid. (Instructions are
given in the kde laptop control panel). The laptop suspends to ram nicely
when the lid is closed.

Suse has toshiba-utilites as an optional package that you can install. This
package gives you tuxtime-conf which allows you to adjust all the power
modes.

/etc/sysconfig/powermanagement has a line
APMD_STOP_SOUND_BEFORE_SUSPEND="no"
that should be set to
APMD_STOP_SOUND_BEFORE_SUSPEND="alsa"
or else the sound system plays too fast after a suspend.

Two mice (internal and usb) play well together if you run
'Yast2->Hardware->Graphics Card and Monitor->change->input devices->mouse'
Remove the mice that are listed.
Add usb-mouse - imps/2
Add ps2-mouse - imps/2, expert tab - enable 3 button emulation

Optionally, if the internal pointer is too sensitive (which I found)
/etc/X11/XF86Config can be edited and

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "mouse"
...
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
...
EndSection

can have the following line added berore EndSection

Option "Resolution" "800"

Lastly, the windows keys in the upper right of the keyboard can be made
usefull. They are already mapped to F13 and F17 by SUSE, and in 'control
center -> Regional & Accessibility -> keyboard shortcuts' you can map them to
whatever you want.

Hope this helps someone.