[ltp] Thinkpad 600e troubles

[Daniel Jensen]

I've been having no end of trouble getting a TP600E set up correctly.
After a dozen kernel recompiles and a bunch of putzing around with
userspace I'm about ready to tear my hair out; I thought I'd try asking
here first and perhaps save myself from getting some strange pattern
baldness.

Thinkpad-acpi doesn't seem to be able to do much in the way of hotkey
support; I can get the standby button to work sometimes but not always,
and the hibernate button never works (I'm not just talking "it doesn't
hibernate," rather "it doesn't seem to be generating any events I can
set up ACPI actions for"). The kernel boot message is:
thinkpad_acpi: acpi_bus_get_device(hotkey) failed: -19
thinkpad_acpi: disabling subdriver hotkey
thinkpad_acpi: asked for hotkey mask 0x0001880c, but firmware forced it
to 0x0000080c
thinkpad_acpi: required events 0x000180000 not enabled!

If anybody has any insight on how to get resuming from standby to
display something other than garbage without manually switching to one
of the non-X terminals and then back to X, I'd be quite grateful. I hear 
s3_bios options and vbetool are used for this kind of thing, but I
haven't been able to discover a combination that works.

I'd been having trouble with a PCMCIA wifi card (rtl8185-based TrendNet, 
it was reporting <10% signal strength even when I was less than 1m from 
the AP- it seemed quick enough most of the time but also dropped the 
connection fairly often, and the person I'm setting this up for may not 
have access to as strong a signal as I have at home). I'd heard that 
upgrading would help; I upgraded to 2.6.31.12. (I've been using 
VectorLinux and 2.6.31 is the latest stable series they've got an
archive with their custom patches applied for; most of the stuff they
applied has gone mainline AFAIK, so it might not be a problem to switch
to mainline if a newer stable series would magically make all my
problems go away.) The upgrade made the reported signal strength roughly 
double (big whoop, given it should be 100%) and I haven't seen it drop 
the connection as it had been doing before, but it made sound stop 
working. Now I get the boot messages
wss: can't grab port 0x530
cs423x-pnpbios 00:07: disabled
cs423x-pnpbios: probe of 00:07 failed with error -16

If nobody has a clue on the sound I may just downgrade back to 2.6.27
where I had working sound, change to 8k kernel stacks, and use
ndiswrapper for the wifi card (it seemed to work ok on a previous
version of the distribution when no native driver was available; I'm
kind of loath to have to use ndiswrapper but them's the breaks).