[ltp] Thinkpad i1230

[Steve Dalton]

Hi Thomas,

I also have a 1200 - the 1260, which is the same as yours but with a TFT
screen, so I probably can't help you with your problem. HPA is IBMs low cost
screen technology - not as clear as TFT and you can't get the high
resolutions that TFT gives you.

X works fine for me (although the SMI EM+ chipsets are not yet supported by
XFree86 4 - so we'll have to wait a little for that). I use the "IBM 9514- B
TFT Panel @ 1024x768" setting for my monitor - this probably won't work for
you, but you could give it a try. I know that you can't break TFT laptop
screens with odd refresh rates the way that you can break monitors, but I'm
not sure if this is true for HPA.

On another note, you are the first person I have come across who has
installed Linux on a 1200 and would be interested in swapping stories. These
are my current problems:

a) Sound card not supported by any the sound implementations. The chipset is
a CS4229 - which is pretty new....it wasn't even on the Cirus Logic webpage
when I first brought the machine. Suppose I will have to wait a bit for
this...
b) Lucent Winmodem driver doesn't work with my Kernel. Although I believe
there is a workaround at http://www.heby.de/computer/ltmodem that I haven't
had the chance to try yet.
c) I seem to have a problem with my PCMCIA controller, which is causing
problems with using my Netgear 510C Cardbus Ethernet card. The Soundcard and
the Cardbus controller are both using IRQ11 and I think this is causing the
PCMCIA controller probe to fail when the kernel module for the ethernet card
is loaded. Hopefully I should get this one sorted soon.
d) No USB support for the Teac USM Floppy disk drive yet.

Sorry I can't help more. If you want information on HPA and the spec of you
laptop - there's a whole heap of information on the ibm website.

Regards,
Steve


______________________________________
Steve Dalton
Sydney, Australia
http://members.dingoblue.net.au/~groundhog
----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas R. Dean <trdean@home.com>
To: <linux-thinkpad@bm-soft.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2000 11:35 AM
Subject: [ltp] Thinkpad i1230


> I have just purchased an IBM Thinkpad i1230.
> (ordered thursday, arrived by courier on friday).
> I have installed redhat 6.2 on the machine, and
> restored the Win98 onto a 1.5G partition that I
> left as hda1. My main purpose for the laptop is
> to use it to display overheads when teaching 4th
> year Comp Sci.
>
> My questions have to do with X.  The screen is
> a 13" 800x600 HPA screen. It is not a TFT (or at least
> they do not advertise it as such).  I'm not sure what
> the technology is. The screen is fine for my purposes.
>
> For the first attempt I set it to LCD screen 800x600.
> This caused problems as the chip set (SMI Lynx EM4+)
> would not generate the frequency (VRefresh 60). I
> manually broadened the VRefresh to 55-65, and got
> X up and running. A second install (after I figured out how
> to have both win95 and linux partitions) I set the screen to
> IBM TFT. This gave a VRefresh range of 55-170.
> I manally reduced this since I have to be able to hook
> this up to an external projector and tested it with an
> external Komodo 14" monitor.
>
> My questions are:
>
>   1. Are there any restrictions on the frequencies that
>      will be accepted by the HPA screen.  Older CRT
>      monitors could be damaged by out of spec
>      frequencies. Do I have to worry about this with
>      the HPA screen? I'm not sure to what extent the
>      TFT scan rates are applicable to HPA screens.
>
>   2. If the external monitor is hooked up when I start X,
>       everything is fine. However, if i use Fn-F4 to switch
>       while X is running, the external monitor (Komodo)
>      goes out of range (the leds on the front blink back
>      and fourth) and when the LCD comes back on, it is
>      in a wierd mode which flickers, is double interflaced,
>      and X locks up. Ctrl-Backspace stops X and
>      everything is fine.  X can be restarted at that point
>      and everything is fine again. While I don't expect to
>      be switching, the behaviour was unexpected.
>      Why would it change scan rates?
>
> Thanks in advance for the help.
>
> Tom.
>
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