My gut told me to install Mac0s86 or FreeBSD on it. I eventually decided on Ubuntu because it is one of the easiest O/S's I have installed. If I could get Ubuntu working on the tablet, I would decide if another O/S would be worth doing in the future.
I excitedly brought the machine home with the power cord/brick in hand. It came with a multi 
dock, but it was so huge, I left that at work. I brought out my handy set of DVD/CD install media when I realized that there weren't any optical drives on the machine. In fact, there aren't any optical OR floppy drives! I figured, ah, easy enough, I will just make a jump drive installer or at least play with the O/S via a jump drive. I setup a drive, plug it in, and to my surprise, it isn't recognized! Next step, check the boot menu. There is no option to boot to USB on this computer. Time to surf the net.
dock, but it was so huge, I left that at work. I brought out my handy set of DVD/CD install media when I realized that there weren't any optical drives on the machine. In fact, there aren't any optical OR floppy drives! I figured, ah, easy enough, I will just make a jump drive installer or at least play with the O/S via a jump drive. I setup a drive, plug it in, and to my surprise, it isn't recognized! Next step, check the boot menu. There is no option to boot to USB on this computer. Time to surf the net.This project that I expected to last all of 2 hours, had blown up in my face. I was now researching information on this laptop. Apparently, there are a select group of USB DVD/CD drives that this machine will use to boot itself into. There were mentions of using a USB floppy drive, but I didn't have any at my house. I did see some mention of PXE installs, but I had not tried doing that before. It was getting late and I had to work the next day. Plus, the multi dock was at work, and hopefully the DVD drive on that will allow me to install via DVD.
The next morning, I come to work really early. I figured I could try and get this thing working before I started work. I plug it into the dock, insert the DVD and boot up. It boots into Windows. I check the boot sequence in the BIOS and try again. No luck. I press F12 during boot up so I can manually choose my boot device. Still no work. Apparently, you can't use the Multi Dock either. I have time, so I do more research online.
I find a USB floppy but I decide to go with a PXE install first because I had not tried it before and it might prove a good learning experience. The only machine I had available was a PIII Windows laptop. I follow the instructions from a site I find on the internet (http://hugi.to/blog/archive/2006/12/23/ubuntu-pxe-install-via-windows). It is very well written and easy to follow. I suggest you visit that if you are considering a similar install.
After setting up tftp and playing with the IP settings the M200 finally booted to an Ubuntu install screen.
I ran through the install pretty easily except for one brainfart.
The first few times I ran through the install, I got an error stating that the archive link was wrong (or something like that). I realized that the machine would need to connect to the internet to install the O/S in this manner. I ran through the beginning of the install again, and when it came time to connect to the archive, I pulled the crossover cable that I was using and plugged it into my network connection. Of course, this didn't work because the machine was still using it's network credentials it pulled from the windows machine.
I ran through the install again. When the screen appeared that asked what network interface I was going to use, I pulled the crossover cable and put in the network cable. I let the laptop autoconfigure the network settings and followed the onscreen prompts. After everything was done, I had a working Ubuntu install.
Since this is a tablet PC, I was hoping to be able to play with some of the goodies that tablets are known for. First thing was getting the stylus working but it seems to have worked out of the box. If yours does not work, I found the following blog that was pretty informative - http://blog.aliencam.net/tag/wacom-names/.
The other issue was screen rotation. This was something I really wanted working because... Well, this is a tablet computer. I took the information I got off of this really informative blog - http://pdasite.pl/kitor/blog/index.php/linux-on-toshiba-portege-m200/ to get rotation working.
In conclusion, the amount of information about Ubuntu and Linux made this much easier than it could have been. It was still more work than I wanted to spend on a laptop install but it was a good learning experience. Most everything works. I am working on tweaks to make using the tablet more user friendly. Things such as scripts to run the screen orientation, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
