Toshiba Satellite P70-A

Summary
Everything works for me. I've had this laptop for nearly three years now. The build quality is outstanding, it has travelled a lot and taken a lot of bashing. It has a large display which is why I bought it (no loss of pixels yet), very decent performance and two hard drive bays. I replaced one of the discs with a SSD about 18 months ago and it is close to perfect for me. It does run hot when emerge is crunching through a long list of compiles but is not uncomfortable.

I really don't see this machine needing replacing for probably another two years yet. Maybe the discs might need replacing before then but SMART will help with that.

I list some basic configuration files in use on mine at the end of these notes.

Hardware

 * Intel Core i7 G4 - "Haswell". Quad core with hyperthreading
 * 16 GB RAM
 * 2 x 1TB hybrid SATA hard disks with 8GB of SSD each
 * Built in Intel graphics and a discrete Nvidia card which can be accessed via Optimus
 * 17.3" LED
 * Wifi + Ethernet - both are Intel
 * 4 USB3 interfaces
 * Multi finger sense Synaptics touchpad

Installation
You can install Linux without having to accept the Windows 8 license. Enter the BIOS by holding Esc and mashing F2 or F12. Disable SecureBoot and enable booting from DVD/CD. If you get an absolutely black screen, pass acpi_backlight=vendor to the kernel command line. Proceed as normal.

If you enable "Fast boot" hold down F12 before powering on to get to the boot menu, then select Setup menu to enter the BIOS.

There are two hard disks already fitted so you could consider using software RAID at install time

Microcode
Install this: sys-apps/microcode-ctl, configure and run it. I'm fairly sure that Optimus (at least) will not work properly without it.

Network - Wi-Fi and Ethernet drivers:
Install the ebuild to get the required firmware. The kernel driver is iwlwifi.

Graphics and Xorg
I have eventually got it all working Intel + NVidia proprietary driver (using Bumblebee) with a framebuffer console.

Get the Intel graphics working first. Add user to video group. In the kernel config I've got these enabled. No need to enable any other frame buffers - no need for uvesafb etc.

You should also be able to enable fast boot and get a graphical console from grub2 through to X. You should be able to use all the features of the Intel GPU. I was able to get Chrome to fully support WebGL etc by disabling the blacklist in chrome://flags and get a full green set of enabled GPU options in chrome://gpu.

Now install bbswitch, bumblebee and nvidia-drivers. I was able to leave all of that pretty much at defaults in their configs. systemctl enable bumblebeed and reboot

These should return two different sets of working details:

Touchpad

 * Add Synaptics xorg driver to INPUT_DEVICES and ensure that x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics gets built


 * This can be used to get you started in configuring it


 * For KDE Plasma, is providing a GUI control module if USE   is enabled.