[ltp] ThinkPad iSeries 1720 (2672-720)

[rrkrr]

So I've inherited this 1998 vintage Thinkpad with 266 MHz Pentium II and 
RAM upgraded from 64 MB to 256MB.  It has an Ultrabay CDROM/floppy 
combination that is apparently connected via USB.  I looked up the 
machine on IBM's page and found an info sheet on it.

I tried to install Ubuntu a couple of times from their "Alternate 
Install" CD, which uses much simpler graphics.  Each time, things went 
okay until installation of the kernel, at which time the installer lost 
track of the CD drive and could not reconnect to it.  I assume this has 
got something to do with a USB driver.  (How does the machine manage to 
boot from the CDROM?) However, I later tried the Ubuntu Gusty LiveCD 
install from the same CDROM, and this was successful(!???).

I've modded the xorg.conf file to activate the memory overlay for the 
neomagic256AV video card, which makes the Gnome graphics much smoother, 
but it's not quite fast enough to watch Youtube videos - sound is fine, 
but frames are missed.  I haven't successfully configured neomagic 
framebuffer - I always end up with frozen video on boot and have to use 
a console to put the original xorg.conf file back.

On boot, the dmesg file has an item that says the ACPI is old and will 
be inactive by default, but can be turned on by using "acpi-force" in 
the kernel parameters.  I tried this and got a "METHOD_NAME__PRS" errors 
(and several others), so turned off ACPI and turned on APM, which seemed 
to work at first, but now the thing is very slow to boot and appears to 
be trying to use the swap partition on the hard drive for the 
hibernate/suspend record partition.  There is an existing partition on 
the hard drive for this purpose that was not reformatted by the 
installer's partitioner, which couldn't see it.   I know this because 
the Gnome hardware viewing tool does see this partition as sda2. Do I 
need to make this partition bigger to accommodate the increased RAM (I 
assume all RAM is stored on hibernate)?  How do I format/mount this 
partition and persuade the computer to use it for hibernate records?

I've been successful using a PCI card for wired ethernet, but the PCI 
card I got for 802.11g has the dreaded Ralink rt61 chip, which does not 
play nice with Network Manager.  Does anyone know of an  802.11g PCI 
card that does work?  Does anyone have a better video configuration for 
neomagic 256AV?

Bob