[ltp] thinkpad serial killer!

[/dev/rob0]

I am having a devil of a time trying to activate the serial port on a 
new pair of old Thinkpads I got: 600 (2645-8EU) and 600X (2645-9FU).

The 600X boots as it should. The 600 has "192" which I believe is a  
dead CMOS battery, and about 99% of the time refuses to boot 
("I9990305") anything but a floppy. (I found that by using sbootmgr I 
can get a CD-ROM booted, and with the FreeDOS CD in, it can boot the 
hard drive!) Only a 4GB drive in the 600X, an even smaller 2GB in the 
600.

Most efforts have been on the 600X for obvious reasons. Slackware- 
current-20041125 is installed, dual-booting 2.4.27 and 2.6.9. I 
compiled the thinkpad-5.8 driver and tpctl-4.15.

Most tpctl functions seem to work, but anything requiring thinkpadpm 
fails with "Unknown symbol {ge,pu}t_cpu_ptr" errors logged on 2.6.9; 
2.4.27 complains "thinkpadpm.o: init_module: No such device" or 
"thinkpadpm: Power management not active. :-(". ((R) - Despair.com.) 
(The former error may have been when I didn't have
/dev/thinkpad/thinkpad ... udev ate my device node.)

I tried a DOS bootdisk with PS2.EXE ... found in Google, it loads 
everything into a RAMdrive. With a lot of typing "ps2 ? $FOO" I set 
some settings. On the 600 nothing sticks through power off; I guess 
that makes sense with a bad CMOS battery.

I tried FreeDOS and Win95 DOS on the 600X. The good news is that  
FreeDOS mostly seems to work with PS2.EXE. Just as well as Win95 DOS, 
in point of fact. The bad news is that both of them get the same sort 
of error when I try "ps2 sera enable".

I figured that I might have to disable the IR port and the IMODEM. I 
did, rebooting each time. I learned to wait for the thing to turn 
itself off and on again (or so it seemed.) "ps2 ? ir" shows disabled. 
"ps2 ? imodem" gives the same error as does "ps2 sera enable" (telling 
me to go into setup and "initialise".) But "ps2 imodem disable" is 
accepted, saying to reboot for the changes to take effect.

I've been struggling with this for at least a week. Having tried the 
Win95 DOS I am now out of ideas. The tpctl page suggests "setpnp", 
which for some reason I don't have, but I found it in the pcmcia-cs 
source. After that ... nothing. Thomas Hood says he has the thinkpad 
drivers and tpctl working on a 600X! What am I missing?
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