Toshiba A300-1RW and Ubuntu 9.04

My work laptop is a Toshiba Laptop A300-1RW, don't know if this model is world wide used, but it was bought at Portugal.

Beside all hardaware specs, that are no use to refer them, but i'm going to talk about 3 things that dont work so good, and how to correct them.

1 - Bluetooth: This laptop has a H2O Insyde Bios, a bios manufacturer that looks that they just like windows.... I say this because bios upgrades are only available through windows. Bluetooth on and off is only supported in windows. What i mean is that you can only turn Bluetooth on and off using Toshiba software, so if you bluetooth is not ON in Linux, just boot in windows and turn it ON. Then reboot back in Linux... Easy as it gets...

2 - Hotkeys: The keys fn+fx don't work either, because of the bios, of just because linux kernel is not updated, or because it's really a new hardware thing. There are a few programs to use with toshiba laptops, but in the case of my hardware no one supports it. From all the hotkeys in my laptop i needed most was the Brightness one. To by-pass this i used Brightness Applet in panel, just right-click on panel->Add to panel->Brightness applet. Easy, now you can control your brightness

3 - Fan Always on: just add this parameter to your boot kernel definition on /boot/grub/menu.lst,  acpi_osi="Linux", so your menu.lst look something like this:

..........

## ## End Default Options ##

title        Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-15-generic
uuid        ca8d6106-b54d-4f4c-a27b-aba3584dcc8b
kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-15-generic root=UUID=ca8d6106-b54d-4f4c-a27b-aba3584dcc8b ro quiet splash acpi_osi="Linux"
initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-15-generic
quiet
...............

Hope this information helps....