[ltp] A couple of issues with a ThinkPad R51

[Ignacio Fernández Galván]

Hi all,

I've bought a ThinkPad R51 1829-R6G  
(<http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/quickPath.do?quickPathEntry=1829r6g>)

I've installed Mandrake 10.1 and, all in all, it works quite well and I'm  
very happy with it. However, I have a couple of issues I hope you can help  
me to solve:

1.- The system doesn't seem to like booting from hda3. I've installed grub  
on hda3 and left the MBR untouche. If I mark hda3 as the active partition,  
the computer just doesn't boot, it says "No OS found" or something  
similar. Marking hda1 (with WinXP) as active and copying the boot sector  
of hda3 into the windows bootloader seems to work fine. Is this a known  
behaviour? Is there a workaround?

2.- When I shutdown the computer, it doesn't finish. The screen goes blank  
and the HD stops, but the processor (and the fan) is still running, I have  
to hold the power button for a few seconds. I've found this can be solved  
by disabling local apic, however, if I pass "nolapic" to the kernel all I  
get is a blank screen after grub and no apparent activity. I've tried a  
quick kernel compile using the mdk kernel (2.6.8.1-12mdk) and disabling  
local apic there, and that seemed to work. But I wouldn't like to be  
forced to compile my own kernels... any ideas?

3.- This R51 comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon M7 7500. With no special  
configuration or drives (Xorg 6.7.0, radeon driver) I'm getting at most  
550 fps with glxgears (tuxracer and neverball seem to work fine), from  
what I'm seen on the net it looks like this is not a very good  
performance. Is this true? Can I get a better one? (By the way, I set  
"DynamicClocks" to "on", but the xorg log file says it was not used. Does  
this card support it?)

Thanks in advance