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

[Charles E Taylor IV]

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.

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