This page will cover my experience with the Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600.

For a starter, it should be know that there was a class action lawsuit against Toshiba over
 poorly manufactured parts of the 4600. See this link for more info.

I came across the information about the class action due to display problems when I was
 dual booting. Although I have not pin pointed the problem to a specific piece of hardware,
 I still think it is important information. When I was dual booting XP pro and Debian, Sarge,
 there was strange behavior in the display, easily reproducible, and easily worked around,
 but I have never found a clean fix.

Description of the said problem:

The problem only occurred under one specific case: rebooting into Xfree86 after being in
 Windows XP without chuting down the system. Everything would seems normal during
 boot cycle under Debian, display would function normally, without loss of brightness, until
 Xmanager would kick in. For about a split second, the screen would appear normal, but it
 would then dim in such a matter that the display was almost unusable. I tried a couple of
 fixes, thinking the problem was related to a configuration mistake, but I soon realized the
 only way to solve it was to simply shut the system down. This is the first reason why I took
 XP off of this machine.

Other problems with the machine:

There are only a few things that didn't work for me on this machine. The first problem I
 had was described above, which I solved easily by simply removing Widows XP.

-The second problem I had with the machine is also related to the video card.

When I first came across the specs of this laptop, I was excited to see the 16MB accelerated
 video card. Granted that in the world of fast paced CGI's, 16MB is not much, but for a
 laptop released in 2001, this in not too bad, and should in theory allow for some fun 3d
 gaming.

Then I tried to implement Unreal Tournament via Wine (wine is windows emulation under
 linux,)but was only able to get it to work under software rendering. Why not hardware?
 Well, unfortunately too many sites talk about this, but have no good answers. As it turns
 out, the video card is a Trident Cyberblade XP, and is not supported before XFree 4.2. My
 version of XFree86 is 4.3, so I do have all the support possible for my Xmanager. So then
 in theory again the card should support 3d acceleration. Wrong again. The makers of the
 Trident Cyberblade XP seem to be very selfish in sharing the code for the card, and thus
 the team that wrote the drivers for X probably had to go at it from scratch. All that to say,
 no 3d acceleration under linux. I would have to reinstall what I think is part of an evil
 empire to use 3d acceleration, so I simply don't bother.

-The last problem I had with this setup is in relation with the wireless card.

For beginners, it is worth saying that the wireless card works, and took very little to get
 up and running. This site talks about it, and it worked fine for me.

The problem came after getting the card up and running, when I was rebuilding my wireless
 network at home. For a long time, I ran it at WEP 64 bit, and had no problems with it apart
 from the fact that it is much easier to crack then a WEP 128bit. So one day I decided to
 bring it up to 128bit. Although that was not a bad idea, it was an unsuccessful one. I was
 able to test the setup with my friend Ian's laptop, so I knew it was correct. But the Satellite
 Pro 4600 was not getting a lease. We concluded that the problem was in the firmware of
 the wireless card, and since I am not too sure as to how good the batteries life is, I prefer
 not trying to upgrade anything and just let it be. I will survive the WEP 64bit, especially
 since most if not all of my networking takes place via ssh2 (encrypted as well), and all of
 my machines run their own firewalls.

Success stories:

Not all of the stories with this machine are sob stories, in fact it was fairly easy to setup
 with Debian Sarge.

It originally came with Window 98se, but claimed to be Win2k ready. So I did the sensible
 thing, used Mandrake Live CD to wipe the drive, partition it with 2 10Gig partitions, and
 shutdown. Place the Windows XPpro installer, went through with the install, which lasted
 way too long considering the capacity of the 800Mhz processor, finished the install,
 rebooted with Debian Sarge net installer, worked my way through that, maid sure I chose
 my personal settings for the partitioning of the drive, place Sarge on the second partition,
 and the rest was pretty straight forward. By the time I was done with installing Debian, I
 had a successful dual boot of XP pro and Debian Sarge. (I won't go into any more details of
 how to install Debian, since there is plenty of very good manuals online.)

The only down side to this setup, apart from the aforementioned display problem, is that
 the hard drive is only 20Gigs, and although this may seem like a lot, when you dual boot, it
 gets small very fast. The fresh windows install alone used up about 3Gigs of drive space,
 leaving only 7Gigs for miscellaneous applications, and data. Debian, installed the way I did,
 also takes several Gigs of drive space. (I don't use KDE directly, but it is installed as a
 dependency of K3B, the best gui burning software I have used in linux.)

So since 10 Gigs of drive space for Linux to me seemed a little... crowded, since I was having
 strange behavior in between the interaction of the 2 OSes and since I deal with large
 amounts of big NEF (Nikon Electronic File format) I finally decided that XP had to go. Also
 able to get most usability of my I was able to get usability of most, but not all, of my
 Windows programs from Wine, thus allowing me to nuke XP, and get a nifty 10 Gigs more
 of drive space.

Debian Sarge Setup:

After getting Debian installed, I was able to boot the machine directly into KDE. Now don't
 take me wrong on this one, but KDE, like GNOME, is well, resource greedy, and thus when
 dealing with pre Ghz CPUs, should not be installed by default. In fact, there is the choice
 in the Sage setup to install Desktops by default or not, but is not well explained. So I had
 to "manually" remove what was not needed. I changed the default display manager,
 originally GDM (Gnome Display Manager) which gives me the choice of selecting which
  Xmanager I wanted to start, but didn't let me use my startup scripts as I knew them, and
 replaced it with XDM, older, less versatile, but lets me specify in ~/.xsession what I wanted
 to start by default.

Here is how to get an iSight to work under the formentioned configuration.