[ltp] ThinkPad 600E-RedHat 7.3 or 8.0??? -Reply

[Jeff Pummill]

Thanks to the list for all of the responses that I received...

Opted for RedHat 8.0 after some deliberation. Turned off the lm-sensors
package. Took QUITE AWHILE to load nearly 4gb of software (didn't
want to be without anything). Video auto-detected and set up fine.
sndconfig in manual mode allowed me to select the correct sound chip.
Don't have the full scoop on the modem stuff yet. Does RedHat 8.0 install
mwavem from IBM? I haven't looked for it as I finished the installation at
11:00PM and went to bed. Would like to set it up to dial from kppp or the
RedHat dialer.

Definately need to upgrade from 128 megs of memory as I am currently
doing some swapping to disk. Looks like 128 meg SODIMM is about
$25-$35 per stick.

As to the question of what processor my 600E has, it is the PII Mobile
366MHz chip.

Jeff Pummill

>>> Charles E Taylor IV <tomalek@mindspring.com> 01/31/03 10:54am
>>>
On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 07:00:39 -0800
Jeff Pummill <JPummill@supind.com> wrote:

> My first post to this mailing list. I purchased a refurbished ThinkPad
> 600E with 128 Megs of ram, 10 gig drive, cd-rom, etc and am anxious
to
> load my RedHat software on it as soon as it arrives. Are there any
major
> configuration differences between RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 as far as video,
> sound, modem, etc? 

I have both 600 and 770 series machines.  These behave (almost)
identically under Redhat, so my experiences should be applicable.

Buy more RAM.  It's cheap, and these slower machines are much nicer
when
they don't swap to disk.  I have 320M in my 770Z and it runs quite nicely.

Video:  600s use the Neomagic chipset.  This chipset has good XFree
support under RH 7.3 and 8.0, but as far as I know, you don't get any 3D
acceleration. Forget Quake. :)

Modem:  Mwave driver.  I had no problems under RH 7.3 or 8.0.  Under
8.0,
at least, you don't have to compile the kernel module (or recompile the
kernel at all, really). Under 7.3, I don't remember if you do or not.

Audio:  cs4232 driver.  RH 8.0 will try ro autodetect your sound card and
fail.  (I believe the 600E has the same chip as the 770Z.)  Install the
extra package "sndconfig" under RH 8.0 and use it to set up the cs4232
driver manually.  RH 7.3 comes with sndconfig installed by default.

On Red Hat 8, you might wish to rebuild the xft library to enable the
bytecode interpreter if you're using Truetype fonts and want them to look
a little better in Open Office.  If you use Open Office, RH 8.0 is worth
it simply for better font rendering.

> Also, for performance issues, has anyone tried using XFCE or the old
> reliable FVWM2 desktop environments which take up less resources?

My take on this is why suffer when I don't have to?  What speed is your
600E?  If it's PII/266 or better, you should be able to run Redhat 8.0
without stripping it down much - provided you upgrade your RAM a bit.

(I hate editing fvwm2 menus ... :) )

I use Gnome2 on my system.  I'm not sure how much faster/slower KDE
might
be.

> Perhaps a
> kernel recompile to eliminate some overhead?

Shouldn't be necessary, as the kernels are fairly modular as it is.  All I
did was disable some services on my systems.

Suspend and hibernate should work on either RH 7.3 or RH 8.0 without a
kernel recompile.  Remember to have a DOS partition on your hard drive if
you want to use hibernation.

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*  Charles Taylor <tomalek@mindspring.com>
*  Chemistry teacher, Linux enthusiast!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*  College Chemistry website: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/
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