[ltp] A22p - 2.6 kernel with trackpoint,modem and pc speaker?

[Richard]

Dear All,

I'm back on this list again, after a year-long hiatus. It seems time to 
upgrade my A22p from Mandrake 9.1/kernel 2.4 to 10.2/kernel 2.6, and at 
the same time, to update this webpage:
http://www.richard.neill.hemscott.net/a22p-mdk9-1.html
I wondered whether I might ask your help with a few kernel-related 
things:

I'd like to use 2.6 on this, since 2.4 is clearly deprecated, and 2.6 has 
better performance, udev, drivers for external devices (firewire, wifi), 
encryption. However, some things appear not to work:


1)The trackpoint. It works fine in low-sensitivity mode, but I can't get 
tp4d to install to change the settings to high-sensitivity. I found this 
page, but I don't really understand it!
http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee/fun/psaux/


2)The ltmodem driver. I used  http://ltmodem.heby.de/ last time, but 
there are no binary packages for the newer kernels.


3)The pc-speaker. Is there any reason why the system bell doesn't work in 
newer versions of Mandrake? Instead of beeping the system bell, we now get 
a beep.wav played through the soundcard, complete with a 1/2 second delay.
But the gnubeep prgram can still access the pc-speaker.


4)APM appears to have totally vanished from the mandrake kernels, even 
when booted with "ACPI=none". However, this laptop uses APM. Do I need to 
recompile it?


I'm sure all these problems can be solved, but I wondered whether anyone 
here has already solved them? Or can anyone tell me definitively that I 
should just stick to kernel 2.4 ?


Thanks very much for your help,

Regard

Richard