[ltp] Docking station experience

[Markus Alt]

Hi all,

lately I got a docking station (SelectaDock III) for my TP 600X. The
main reason why I wanted to have one was a spare 4 mm tape drive
(originally from a RS/6k) which I intended to intall in the docking
station and use for backups. This works just fine now; after loading the
SCSI modules (or building a kernel with SCSI support meanwhile), the
docking station's SCSI adapter and the attached tape drive are detected
correctly and can be used right out of the box. I use the excellent KDat
tool for backup of filesystems or important single files.

Another benefit was the installation of an external Matrox graphic
adapter. As the TP 600X' NeoMagic NM 2360 graphic chip isn't supported
by XFree86 (yet), I wasn't able to get the external monitor work at a
reasonable resolution & refresh rate. This problem is gone now with the
Matrox card in the docking station.

So far, so good. But unfortunately there's a shortcoming which I'm
willing to tolerate, given the benefits mentioned above, but
nevertheless rather would like to have solved: I'm not able to warm
dock/undock the TP to the docking station. As said, cold
docking/undocking is no problem, but if I want to suspend the TP in
order to undock it afterwards, it emits the usual high/low tone sequence
and does *not* go into suspend mode. Trying to eject the machine from
the docking station in this state by turning the lock key results in a
very high beep (coming from the docking station). I say "trying to
eject" as the TP will not be released from the SelectaDock (physically).

Is there anybody who has similar experience and meanwhile found a way to
circumvent the aforementioned difficulties? Warm docking/undocking isn't
that big issue, but of course it's nice if you can just suspend your
machine, take it home and resume it with all applications being in the
same state as before, so you don't have to restart all that stuff.

TIA for any hint,
Markus
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