[ltp] weird trouble in FC1 on TP770X

Shingo Tamaru linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Thu, 13 May 2004 21:13:19 -0400


Hi, Thanks for replying me.

I tried what Satish suggested but none of them solved the problem.
However, this problem was really odd. When I typed a keyboard,
mozilla just froze as I reported in my previous post. Then I left the
machine as it was for a couple of minutes and everything start
working again! I didn't do anything but the problem was just gone.
I searched on the web for information about this kind of trouble and
found another post reporting exactly the same behavior. All I had to
have was found to be just a little bit of patience. ;-)

OK, now I'm comfortable on my TP770X and ready to reply to
Bert's question.
TP770X is MMC-2 so it is possible to upgrade the CPU to PIII-500.
However, there are some problems associated with this CPU
upgrading. Here is the list of the problems and solution for them.

1: The boot process will be trapped with 127 error. I need to
push keys two times to boot the OS.

2: After upgrading the CPU to PIII, this machine cannot boot from
the CDROM drive any longer. I don't have an ext. FDD, so I had
to first install DOS onto the HDD, make it recognize the CDROM
and start FC1 installer from DOS prompt.

3: The 770X bios does not enable the L2 cache of a PIII CPU. So
I have to first enable the L2 cache by using a dos utility called
'cache enabler' and then boot FC1 linux using loadlin.

4: I don't know if this is caused by the CPU upgrade. But the FC1
kernel does not work if apm is on. So a command 'apm=off' must
be passed to the kernel when booting up.

After doing all these tricks, FC1 works just fine on TP770X.
Everything, including sound, L2cache and mozilla, works fine so far.

These problems should be common for both TP600E and TP770X/Z
retrofitted with a PIII CPU. If you are interested in installing linux
on these machines and want more information, please let me know.

Thanks again.
Shingo