[ltp] TP 600-5FSW 650Mhz/12G, X crash

[Markus Alt]

Leif Jonsson wrote:
> 
> Hi all!
> 
> I have just received my new TP 600 and the joy was great! Unfourtately
> my cup was smolered. X frequently hangs and the whole system has been
> quite shaky. =(
> 
> Does any one else experience the same problems?

I have had similar effects on my 600X (2645-9FG), although I wouldn't
say that X hangs *frequently*. It just :-/ happened several times -
still enough to be very annoying though!

I'm still not sure whether to blame it on X or if these hangups were
caused by problems with ReiserFS (the new journaled filesystem for
Linux) which I installed for the first time on this machine. There are
reports about weird behaviour in ReiserFS when writing large amount of
data and IIRC the system got stuck in such situations (e.g. getting
really big files via FTP).

Anyway, with respect to X, the main problem with the 600X is that its
NeoMagic MagicGraph 256ZX graphics controller (aka NM2360) isn't yet
supported by the XFree86 server. (Somebody correct me please if I'm
wrong here - and point me to the place where to get the correspoding
server! :-) ) So you have to select the 600E's MagicMedia 256AV (NM2200)
when configuring X.

Unfortunately, with that configuration you cannot use more than 16 bit
color depth and also I wasn't able to get an external display working at
a usable resolution & frequency (i.e. > 60 Hz). Maybe the problems you
experienced are also related to the fact there's no "native" support for
the NM2360.

A hint, finally: It may be totally coincidental, but I tried to use the
XF86config file which Manoj Kasichainula put on his webpage 

   http://www.io.com/~manoj/linux-tp600x

and ever since I haven't had any more X hangup. (The 16 bpp and external
display limitations still apply, though.) Maybe you should give it a try
...

Markus
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