[ltp] 600(E) questions

[wes schreiner]

André Wyrwa wrote:

>Hei,
>
>finally, it's time for me to get in touch with the legend... ;-)
>
>Got a used 600E today which will travel with me to siberia as a present
>for someone. Having a look at it and trying to install some reasonable
>system some questions are digging their way along to the surface of my
>skull...
>
>1) I can't figure how to access the BIOS...what key will i have to
>press? (Neither F1 nor DEL seemed to do anything, also i don't get any
>message at the boot screen, just the notion that this is a
>  
>

Hold F1 on power on, as Adam said.  But this only lets you access the 
most basic settings.  You will also want to run ps2.exe for the more 
advanced settings.

>ThinkPad. ;-) )
>
>2) Actually i do get more info on the boot screen... a number 16..... at
>the top left corner. It seems only to appear on powering on, so i guess
>it's the mem self test?
>  
>

Yes, the recognized RAM size appears at the top right.  If there are 
error codes they appear at the bottom, if I remember correctly.

>3) Its a long time since i used Win 98SE. Do you think the speed gain is
>worth sacrificing improved stability of W2K or WXP? (Also i'll only have
>1.3 GB for the win system partition).
>  
>

It really depends on your usage.  W98 will take up less space.  
Personally I have a small FAT partition just for the hibernation file, 
MSDOS, and ps2.exe.  The other 39.6G is Linux.

>4) I did a (quick) SuSE 9.0 OEM (german) installation. Can anyone
>recommend me a not too big distro that supports at least russian and
>german or english (can't speak russian myself). Thinking about
>this...shouldn't every russian localized distro also support english (in
>non-localized mode)?
>  
>

Sorry, I'm no help on internationalization.

>5) After installing SuSE i did a quick test to play an xvid video from
>CD. Kaffeine pretended to play but i neither saw any picture nor heared
>any sound. Did anyone run into this before?
>  
>

Sound is going to take some manual tweaking by you.  OSS is pretty 
easy.  ALSA is a bit more to configure, but it gives you more control 
over the hardware.  As for video, you might need to add the "OverlayMem" 
option to your XFree86Config file.  See 
<http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/neomagic.4.html>

Other things every 600E owner needs:

BIOS firmware and Windows device drivers at
<http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/DSHY-3TLQ2L.html?lang=en_US&page=brand&brand=root&doctype=&subtype=Cat>

IBM page on the modem driver for Linux at
<http://www-124.ibm.com/acpmodem/>

The hardware maintenance manual at
<ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/09n1033.pdf>

Product support page.  This is for a 600E 2645-4AU, but yours will be 
similar and you can change the product once you load this page.  (awful 
long link)
<http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/product.do?template=/productpage/landingpages/productPageLandingPage.vm&brandind=10&familyind=50130&machineind=61659&modelind=64010&partnumberind=0&subcategoryind=0&doctypeind=3&doccategoryind=0&validate=true>

Thomas Hood's 600X Linux page.  Most of this info applies to the 600E too.
<http://panopticon.csustan.edu/thood/tp600lnx.htm>

Linux on ThinkPads webring hub.
<http://t.webring.com/hub?ring=linuxthinkpad&list&page=0>

That should be enough to get you started.

wes