Well, after a couple of weeks of fiddling and experimenting on the trains going to and from work, I now have my laptop working with a 2.4.0 kernel (with reiserfs patches), reiserfs root, devfs, usb and Debian/Unstable. I've finally gotten the kernel sound drivers to work and now I'm ready for my next 2 projects.
The first is the built in modem, which alas, appears to be a lucent winmodem. I've got the various drivers that are out there, but they don't seem to see the modem (which I know is there). Has anyone else had experience with this particular laptop in this respect? The second project is the docking station, I got a really, really good deal on it (US $20!) and would like to use the two pcmcia card slots in it for my wired network cards. It works under windows, so I know the slots are good. The pcmcia card manager does apparently see all four slots when docked, it just won't recognize a card plugged into a docking station slot. Again, if anybody has experience with this let me know? I have all the toshiba utilities and they are working (I actually get almost an hour more battery out linux than windows!). Now I'm wondering if any of my fellow debian users have made these final two things work. And of course, if anybody has questions about how I got the rest of the stuff to work, I'm happy to answer them! jim