[ltp] newbie: what's the best distribution for ThinkPad 600E?

[Steve Tell]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2001, Ravi Pratap M wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> 	Could somebody please explain to me whether I have to worry about
> this lm_sensors problem ? What exactly is it anyway ?

In short, a mechanism for (in other machines) querying sensors such as
temperature and fan rotation speed over an I2C bus on the
motherboard.  I2C was never designed for "plug and play" detection of what
devices are present on the bus.   The tp600 has an EEPROM containing
some kind of BIOS-critial information on the I2C bus, which gets corrupted
if ever the sensors-detect program is run.   If this EEPROM is corrupted,
the thinkpad won't boot.  See the mailing-list archives for more info.
 
> 	I find that RH 7.1 has installed lm_sensors and that kdebase
> depends on it and doesn't let me rpm -e it.
> 
> 	Do I need to do something I am not doing currently ?

First thing I did was zero out permissions on sensors-related /dev nodes,
and remove the lmsensors-related shared libraries and kernel modules that
I found.

Then, since I had to rebuild the kernel anyway to get suspend/resume to
work, I configured out the lm-sensors and motherboard I2C stuff.
I'm fairly sure this makes things completely safe, but even so I haven't
risked trying to run sensors-detect.


Incidently, I did a detailed writeup on how I constructed an RH-7.1-like
kernel 2.4.2 RPM with this thinkpad-600E configuration.  I actually find
it easier to touch up the kernel .src.rpm and build a new kernel binary
RPM than to install the kernel-source "binary" RPM and do the usual kernel
make config/make dep/make/make modules stuff in /usr/src/linux.


the writeup is: 
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~tell/dist/kernel2.4.2.txt 

the truely adventurous can try the kernel rpm at your own risk:
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~tell/dist/kernel-2.4.2-2tp.i386.rpm
All I know its its been running nicely on my 600E 2645-UN1 for a few
weeks.

Steve

--
Steve Tell  tell@telltronics.org 


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