I've been rather unsucessfully trying to set up a dual partition with linux
and xp on my toshiba 2435-S255 2.4P4. I tried MIT's athena linux based on rh
and also tried to run knoppix from the cd. They both die vv soon after the
kernel tries to load. They work fine on my roomate's laptop (toshiba @ 1.6P3
I think). I'm new to linux so any advice would be greately appreciated. Do
you have any idea on how to get it to work or whether any other
distributions might work? Has anyone attempted to set up linux on this
particular model??

The RedHat, Mandrake and probably many more
distributions of linux will just not boot on the
machine with a default kernel. This is fixable...

The Easy Way:
According to other people on the list the Debian and
SUSE distributions work fine. If you are new to
linux, then I suggest you download, borrow, or buy one
of these distros. I haven't used them myself... I
wanted Mandrake so I had to fix things the hard way.

The Hard Way:
The Mandrake install comes with a few alternate
versions of the kernel.. I did get one of these to
work and do a base install. To do this you have to go
to "more options" when you first pop in the CD and it
asks you what you want to do... then I selected a
version 2.2 kernel. All the 2.4 kernels hung for me.

This let me do a base install of the system, but
Mandrake only installs the 2.4 kernel... so when I
tried to boot up it would freeze again. All of the
rescue images that came with mandrake had the exact
same problem and I could not figure out how to use the
2.2 kernel that came with mandrake for anything other
than installing the system.

I needed a rescue CD... with a kernel that worked and
it was a challenge to find one. In hindsight I
suggest you try a rescue CD from debian or SUSE. btw,
if you have a CD burner you can download the floppy
disk images you find on the net and burn them to a CD.
but if you are trying to do this from windows...
you'll need to find the windows versions of cdrecord
or something. I was stuck on this step for several
days because I couldn't find a CD that worked and had
what I needed.

Once I got a rescue CD that could boot the machine I
used the unix command "chroot" to make it seem like I
had booted my base install of mandrake, instead of the
rescue CD. I managed to download the latest linux
kernel source and to get the acpi patch to match. I
don't know that the acpi patch is required... It was
suggested by people here and I never tried without it.

The next important step was configuring the kernel...
I turned off almost everything. then I did the
standard "make dep; make bzImage; make modules; make
modules_install;" finally a "make install" actually
copies the kernel to the boot area and runs "lilo" so
that the kernel will boot.

It worked! My system could finally boot without a
rescue CD. I've spent the time since then turning on
more things in the kernel as I've found them to be
needed.

I'm not sure exactly what option was causing boot to
fail. The only major change I've made is disabling
APM and all the options related to it. It seems that
as soon as I turn on any of that stuff my machine can
not boot up.

Again, the hard part here was finding a rescue CD that
could boot my machine and had enough functionality for
me to recompile and install the kernel.