[ltp] Preferred distro for Thinkpads? -> Mandrake issues

[Marcin Trybus]

Ignacio Fernández Galván wrote:

> Well, fortunately for me, I didn't have those issues. First, I 
> upgraded  with urpmi, so I can't compare both versions 
> "out-of-the-box" (and anyway,  I don't remember how 10.1 was when I 
> first installed it). Then, with 10.1  I could not suspend to disk, 
> eth0 just died and could only be revived with  a reboot, now it works 
> fine, I guess due to the new kernel. The new  automount works fine for 
> me, but I've never changed drives, it's always  with the DVD-RAM.


In 10.1 my suspend-to-disk used to work (albeit from klaptop only) from 
the start (the ibm-acpi not set up), but the Fn-F12 didn't. The main 
problem was that the system clock got suspended as well. :-D I didn't 
realize that until much later, when I checked the time late in the night 
and it showed something around 11 in the morning 3 days earlier. The 
system clock resets the machine's HW clock upon shutdown, so the error 
stacked up that high.
I didn't have any eth0 problems, but I didn't use it that often. It 
worked every time I needed it though. I have the standard 100Mbit Mini 
PCI card (FRU P/N: 26P8181), using the "e100" driver module.

> The only problem I've found is the system locks up randomly when 
> starting  X. I have not been able to know why, but at least 1 out of 
> 10 times I have  to hard-reboot. The workaround is easy: this only 
> happens when booting up,  it has *never* happened (knock on wood) when 
> suspending to disk and waking  up.


My X works OK (different GPU) but my system has frozen twice this week 
while connected to the net over my LT modem. In this case I guess that 
either the latest gaim (1.5.0; Mdk10.0.rpm) or Firefox (1.0.6; standard 
binary installer) I downloaded recently is to blame. The source-compiled 
lt_modem driver works for over 1-1/2 years without problems (I recompile 
it with every new kernel version I compile of course).

> I'm sorry you've had a bad experience with LE2005. As for your 
> problems,  could it be due to the graphics driver? I'm using the 
> standard radeon  driver in Xorg.


No need to be sorry - I picked tho distro myself. :-) What _really_ 
pisses me off is that the 10.2 has almost no important "devel" packages 
like libgtk (and its dependencies) or SDL and it was pain in the neck to 
find and download the exact versions over my 56k connection to be able 
to compile any X application (like Downloader4X or FreeCiv).
I should have upgraded the GPU driver a long time ago. As I wrote 
earlier my T23 has the infamous S3 GPU, not ATI. The thing is that it 
worked perfectly (aside the glitches while waking-up) with the Xorg 
driver supplied with 10.1, now it doesn't. Now getting it to work 
properly is No.1 on my Linux TODO list.

Regards

Marcin Trybus