[ltp] Mandrake 10.1 Additional Driver Floppie

[Donald B. Altman]

** Reply to message from SOTL <sotl155360@earthlink.net> on Wed, 1 Dec 2004 07:53:44 -0500

Hi Frank,

I had SuSE 9.1 running on my Thinkpad A21p, which may help.  It had the 1600X1200
display, ATI mobile radeon, 3Com mini-PCI ethernet/modem.  I ran it both standalone
and from a Thinkpad dock using an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse going
through a Linksys 4-way KVM.

Everything worked fine except the modem, which is proprietary.  I had to use the
boot parameter "acpi=off" , which I entered in grub's menu.lst in order to get the
3Com ethernet card to work (see yesterday's post about SuSE 9.2 ethernet on the 
same machine).  

I fell back to the
VESA framebuffer drivers to get the external monitor to work.  That was likely
due to my lack of knowledge about X.  But I needed a workaround, not an education,
at that point.

At one point I added more memory and swapped to a 60G disk with no problems.  
I found it a robust machine under Linux.  I ended up getting a new Thinkpad only 
since I have some Wxx apps that I must run in VMWare.   The A21p was just too slow 
for that.  

I never got the modem to work.  I got about 2.5 hours/battery.  I'm currently using it 
to work out any bugs before I install SuSE 9.2 on my new T42.  Hence
my call for help yesterday.  I still can't get the ethernet to work.  I'd suggest
using SuSE 9.1 before you try their current offering.

As I suggested yesterday, the best way I know to locate any problems is to boot knoppix.  
It has superior hardware detection.  If knoppix doesn't run, you're going to
have a struggle using any other Linux distro.  If it does run, you've got reassurance
that at east one distro will work.  And, if you must, you can easily install knoppix to
your HD.  That gives you a good Debian installation.  And the knoppix community
is very active in supporting users.

Good luck.

Don A

-- 
Donald B. Altman
Singular Technologies
Croton-on-Hudson,  NY