Thinkpad features program

Henk Hesselink linux-thinkpad@www.bm-soft.com
Wed, 21 Apr 1999 12:24:46 +0000


Robert,

Unfortunately for us non-North Americans, according to the help page:

     Currently, the Discussion Forums are available to Profiled Customers in
     North America only. Support for customers in other countries will be coming
     soon.

> If you don't have this URL already, here's an official IBM starting point...
>
> http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/support/thinkpad/tptechref.html
>
> With a Thinkpad serial number, IBM will grant a "personal" page and access to the Thinkpad Discussion Forums

I have a 770X (with the 1280x1024 screen) which I bought specifically for the large screen.  It's an awesome machine, beautiful, bright screen, no dud pixels, very nice keyboard, feels very solid.
Redhat 5.2 runs without a hitch.  For sound I use Alsa: I configure as a CS4236, Alsa identifies a cs4239, warns that this chip is not fully supported and then proceeds to work perfectly (xamixer shows
more buttons than I know what to do with, 3 master volume buttons?!?).  The mouse pointer thingy works, but less smoothly than on my Toshiba: it's very sluggish and to get a reasonable response I need
to set the acceleration threshold at 2, which makes it a little jumpy.  I've installed VMware and their X server with the accel option works well (based on the latest X server, SVGA.3.3.3.1).  When I
pull out my TP at a client and proceed to show them Windoze running in a window on one of the virtual desktops (I use KDE) this just blows them away :-)

My main problem right now is APM: the machine doesn't suspend when the lid is closed, and when opened my X display goes into a weird sort of dynamic impressionist painting mode and hangs (sometimes so
thoroughly that a hard reset is needed).  Or, sometimes, the X display comes up but the ethernet connector hangs.  I've followed all suggestions I've seen: compiled new kernel with APM_NOINTS undef'ed,
floppy driver as a module, only suspend when on battery, eject PCMCIA cards, etc.  The only thing that consistently seems to work is "cardctl eject" but it's a pain to have to do this manually (and of
course sometimes I forget ...).  Maybe one could add a hook to apmd, but that seems like a hack.  Additionally, I use DHCP and for some reason I need to do the eject-insert cycle twice (both with
cardctl and when physically removing a card), the first time the eject complains with "resource busy" and the following insert fails.  Very strange.

If anybody has any suggestions they would be much appreciated.

It would also be nice to be able to check what powersave mode you're in after pushing F11 (on the Toshiba there is a cycle: max-configurable-min with a LED going from green to orange in min mode so it's
easy to figure out).

Henk Hesselink
Anda Consulting