[ltp] thinkpad serial killer!

[/dev/rob0]

On Friday 24 December 2004 23:34, I wrote:
> 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).

It's incredible, usually one would think a serial port these days a 
minor thing. Mice use USB or PS/2, and in the rare cases I might use a 
modem, it would be PCMCIA. But I really wanted one of these laptops to 
work with a GPS ... serial interface.

Looks like I'm going to be stuck selling these and buying something 
else. I could get a USB-to-RS232 converter, but I don't want to be 
adding more gadgets -- I want to be portable.

> 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

Also had to recompile the kernel with this:
$ zgrep PNPBIOS /proc/config.gz
CONFIG_PNPBIOS=y
CONFIG_PNPBIOS_PROC_FS=y

No effect. There is still no /proc/bus/pnp:
$ /sbin/lspnp
lspnp: /proc/bus/pnp not available

Strange thing: pnpbios and isa_pnp were not module-capable in my 
menuconfig. Seems like I've always had isa_pnp as a module in 2.4.x. I 
guess I'll try a 2.4 kernel again ... quite an annoyance to have to 
switch back and forth, what with udev and deleted device nodes.

Is there something else that has to be a module before the PnP drivers 
can be modular? Nothing on the Device Drivers -> Plug and Play support 
menu is shown as "< >" module capable.

> source. After that ... nothing. Thomas Hood says he has the thinkpad
> drivers and tpctl working on a 600X! What am I missing?

DOS didn't work. I found a Win98 bootdisk, which had the same errors 
with PS2.EXE as FreeDOS and DOS95 did. A temporary install of Windows 
isn't really possible either: I only have '95, which I bet isn't fully 
supported, and the hard drives are too small anyway.

One last idea, but I think it's a long shot: is it possible to use the 
ibm-acpi driver on these old thinkpads? The site does not list any 
600's as supported, and CMOS control doesn't mention setting PnP device 
resources, so it looks like uncharted territory.
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