[ltp] Red Hat 9 and the Thinkpad 770Z

[Charles E Taylor IV]

Now that it's been release everywhere, I've downloaded a copy of Red Hat 9
and installed it on my Thinkpad 770Z (PII/366, 14G HD, 324M RAM).  Here
are some notes on the installation:

* General installation:  
- The initial installation went smoothly.  I
installed about 2 gigabytes worth of stuff, including Gnome, development
tools, Mozilla, Open Office, etc.  The install was as simple as booting
with the first disc in the CD-ROM drive...

* Thinkpad setup:
1) Sound:  I'm not yet brave enough to try fooling with ALSA, so I made
sure to add the "sndconfig" package during the install.  This is the old
text-based sound configuration utility, and it works fine for setting up
the sound on a TP 770Z.  You must run it with the --noprobe option, else
it will identify your sound card as a CS4610 which it says is unsupported.
 I ran it with --noprobe, and selected CS4232 driver with io=0x530 irq=5
dma=1 dma2=0 mpuio=0x300 mpuirq=5.  I had sound.

2) Modem:  mwave 1.0.4, from IBM, works on Red Hat 9.  Red Hat's already
provided the device driver module, so you need no kernel sources to
install the rest of the mwave driver.

3) APM: I'd already had a hibernation file/partition created for my
previous install, so I didn't have to do anything new.  No kernel
recompilation is necessary for suspend/hibernate to function properly,
though you will want to add "mwaved" to the list of services restarted on
resume (/etc/sysconfig/apmd), as suspend/hibernate kills the modem.  I
usually restart sound on resume as well, since the sound chip seems to
sometimes get confused on a suspend.

4) X:  Happily, the xv support works properly.  The only configuration
issue was that I had to manually select "LCD Display 1024x768" during the
install.  I've been able to use xmame and xine without problem - so if
you're looking to play some DVDs or VCDs, this release works a lot better
than Red Hat 8.0 - at least for the one movie I've gotten to watch so far.
:)

5) USB/PCMCIA:  My external USB mouse and Netgear ethernet card were
recognized with no problem.  No special configuration necessary.

6) Printer:  CUPS is finally painless to set up with Red Hat.  Printing to
a windows shared printer works with no fuss.  Whew.

General comments:
- RPM seems a little more fragile in this release.  I've had to rebuild
the database once already.  After that, it seems to work properly.
- Gnome has a few more nice touches this time around.  Unfortunately,
editing the menus does not seem to be one of them.  (IS there an easy way
to edit the Gnome menus in Red Hat 9?  Editing menus in Nautilus doesn't
seem to work.)
- Still no MP3 support.  I'm not really complaining much, as it's easy to
add.  Plus, I understand why they did it.
- Get apt for RPM from freshrpms.net. This is the best way to get media
players (mp3, DVD, VCD, etc.) on your new installation.
- You'll need to recompile the freetype-2.1.3-6 package (after editing
the spec file to reenable the bytecode interpreter) if you want the best
quality for your TrueType fonts.