[ltp] My sad 600E-2645 story

[Ken Restivo]

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So here is my sad story.

I have a 600E-2645U. It worked OK with Debian Woody and kernel 2.4.18. Suspend worked, all the function keys worked, sound worked, etc. Even the serial ports after getting advice here on using pcmcia-cs with pnp. It was a bit interrupt-starved, but I put the LPT in poll-only mode and got enough IRQ's to run two PCMCIA cards.

Only problem was: it would hang periodically, at least twice a day. Hard, total-lock-up, "it's dead, Jim" freezes: with the machine running, CPU fan spinning out of control, no keyboard reponse (not even sysreq or 3-finger-salute), no network, no serial, a blank screen. Power key did work though, and a hard reboot brought everything back. This tended to happen when the thing was 1) plugged in, and 2) all done recharging. I suspected perhaps a stray interrupt (APCI on unused IRQ9?)... or... who knows?

I'd upgraded the BIOS to IBM's latest available for this machine, back in April or thereabouts. No love. It was really annoying to have this thing acting so flaky.

So, for other reasons, I upgraded to kernel 2.4.21-rc6. This had ACPI, so I tried it. Lo and behold, the hangs/lockups went away! However, no sleep, no function keys (which means no audio!!) no battery status in ACPI, total ugliness.

So, I'll ask: what kernel cocktail should I try, to get this machine to work properly? Meaning: suspend/sleep, power/battery management, all the function keys, two PCMCIA slots, the serial and IRDA ports, maybe even the parallel port (I can't stop the lp/parport_pc/parport modules from getting autoloaded). Since this machine is *so* old, and was so popular, I have to believe that it's at least *possible* to get it working right. Comments from anyone who has, are appreciated.

Thanks!

- -ken
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