Hi. I have reason to believe that I made a very big and costly mistake. If I sound vague in my description of the problem then the reason for that is I really don't understand what the problem is. I've never experienced something like this on a laptop before. I'm going by memory here so the commands and file contents I list might not be completely accurate so I apologize for any confusion beforehand. I can't access the laptop anymore to verify =( I was using SuSE 8.2 on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 with great success. The only problem was that the lcd brightness was really overbearing and straining my eyes. I asked for help on undernet in a linux support IRC channel and was told to do the following: % modprobe toshiba_acpi That command worked. Then I edited the following file /proc/acpi/toshiba/lcd The file had two lines. I don't remember the exact name of the second variable. Brightness: 7 Maximumbrightness: 8 I changed the first line "Brightness: 7" to 4. That worked too and I used that for a couple days. In fact for several days without any problems whatsoever. Then one day after changing the value to 4, I changed it to 2. That dimmed the lcd a bit more and I proceeded to do some work when after a few seconds or minutes the laptop locked up. Windowmaker, X, the keyboard or mouse were not responding. I powered down the laptop using the on/off button. When I powered it back up the grub bootloader screen was displayed but the keyboard was not responding. It selected the default boot selection after the timeout period and booted Windows 2000 where the keyboard and mouse were not working. I plugged in a USB mouse and then I could use the mouse that way. Still no keyboard. I'm going to buy a USB keyboard to test if that works. When this laptop boots up it is possible to type F12 before the grub boot menu loads. Doing that gives the option to boot from cdrom, floppy, hard drive, network. I can type F12 but after that it won't let me choose anything else. Same thing if I try to go to the BIOS. If I type ESC before grub loads it says: "Check system and then press F1 to enter BIOS". Usually typing F1 after that message would let me configure the bios but it won't respond if I type F1 after ESC. This is where it gets even more weird. Once in a blue moon the keyboard and onboard mouse work and I am able to boot into either Windows or Linux and issue commands. But only for a few minutes after which the keyboard & mouse stop responding again. When this happened I was able to boot from CD and flashed the bios[1] hoping that would solve the problem but it didn't. It seems like after the first incident the fan doesn't seem to be working like it used to. The laptop starts to get really hot and then everything freezes. How could this affect the machine this way even when I'm not using linux? Can someone who is familiar with this laptop or has general knowledge about linux on laptop please give me some insight as to what is taking place? If I have made a big mistake then I would like to know what so I can learn from it. Thank you for reading this long post. [1]This is the bios utility I used: http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_dtlViewDL.jsp?soid=495595&moid=135844&BV_SessionID=@@@@0639729444.1069796000@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccccadcjmjiheelcgfkceghdgngdgll.0&ct=DL ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca