[ltp] SuSE 9.1 on ThinkPad?

[Crispin Cowan]

James Knott wrote:

> Has anyone tried SuSE 9.1 on a ThinkPad?  Any problems etc?
> I've got an R31 2656-6FU.

I am running SuSE 9.1 Pro on a Thinkpad T40. Notable experiences:

    * Suspend and resume works under ACPI for suspend-to-RAM.
          o sleep with echo -n "mem" > /sys/power/state
          o resume with the power button
          o I have been unable to get the BIOS to cause lid close/open
            to induce suspend/resume.
          o When sleeping, it sleeps hot: it is hot to the touch, and
            burns 10% of a battery per *hour*, approx. 10X the power
            usage I am accustomed to for RAM sleep.
    * Sound works out of the box. First time that has ever happened for
      me on a new laptop.
    * The built-in ethernet worked out of the box.
          o It has a bizarre "dead man walking" problem with respect to
            suspend. The network interface works after a resume, and
            then fails mysteriously 20 minutes later.
          o To fix this problem, do "rmmod e1000" before suspend, and
            "modprobe e1000" when you want it back.
    * The T40 ships with at least three different mini-PCI WiFi cards.
      Mine came with the Intel Pro 2100 card.
          o SuSE correctly detected and identified the card, but the
            driver SuSE installed never worked.
          o I went to http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/ and got an open
            source driver that works. Caveats on that driver:
                + It is under active development.
                + For me, it is quite flaky: it will lose AP association
                  several times a day and not get it back.
                + Version 0.41 uses hostap and hotplug, and can lock the
                  machine when the driver flakes.
                + I use version 0.39, which does not use hostap and
                  hotplug, so that when the driver flakes I only lose my
                  network instead of the whole machine.
    * The kernel is very flaky about recognizing PCMCIA cards. Many
      different memory cards get recognized as memory_cs and therefore
      fail to work. I have no idea how to fix this, other than by using
      the above working drivers for the built-in network hardware.
    * Hotplug USB works. When I plug in my camera or my memory stick,
      Konq pops up and shows me some drag&drop files. Very nice
          o However, if the machine has been suspended before plugging
            in the USB device, it will lock hard. Requires a full
            power-down (remove the battery) to get it back.
          o Only plug in your devices following a fresh boot if you have
            suspended your machine.
          o I cannot tell whether this problem is the 2.6 kernel, the
            SuSE distro, or the Thinkpad T40, all of which are
            simultaneously new to me as of 2 weeks ago.

Crispin

-- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.  http://immunix.com/~crispin/
CTO, Immunix          http://immunix.com