Summary status: Its running, Fedora Core 2 + Linux 2.6.15.
Spec is 1400x1050 screen, 1.7G processor, 1G ram, 1G ethernet, 60G HDD, drive-bay CD-RW/DVD-R or battery option. I use fvwm2, so I have no idea how well gnome and all that stuff will work. If I wanted a horrible GUI desktop system, I'd use the bundled microsoft one.
| X at 1400x1050 (single head) | Works |
| X dual head | Works with a suitable config file |
| Ultradev/touchpad/mouse | Works |
| Ethernet | Works |
| Sound | Works |
| Modem | Works with slmodem, but there is a GPL license problem |
| Wireless | Works and does WEP/104 with the right s/w loaded! I think it will do WPA when I get organised |
| Special Function keys | Work pretty well with the right software |
| IRdA | Works |
| APM | Works |
| Dual battery monitor in APM | Works with patch |
| Hot swap of DVD/Battery | Does not work - I would appreciate any help |
| ACPI | Not happy on 2.6.5, not tested on 2.6.15 |
| USB 2.0 | Broken (probably a generic IBM hardware problem) |
Other things I've used/tried.
| Loopback secure filesystem (not the IBM chip) | Works |
| Openswan | Works (with patch for freeS/Wan compatibility in 2.6.5) |
| Ratoc CB31 Ultra-SCSI Cardbus | Works (with patch for autoload) |
| USB to RS232 adaptors | Works |
Latest updates come from updating kernel. This is getting to be an ever more painful exercise! I was on 2.6.5. (old notes). The change was motivated because I wanted the WPA Supplicant stuff on the ipw2100, which wont work on 2.6.5.. Sadly I spent so much time on the upgrade, that I have not actually tested it yet..
I'm not sure whats hapening in the linux kernel team, but from an outside perspective, in the 2.6 kernel tree there seems be be a gratuitous amount of interface changing going on. In a development kernel (ie 2.5/2.7) that would seem a reasonable thing to expect, but in a supposedly stable kernel it only serves to make support problems bigger and drive people away.
Getting back to where I started, took me about a week and a lot of work to track down the subtle things that moved in the kernel API.
At the end of the day, there are answers to all the questions (even if it means sitting down and debugging the problem in the source), its just some seem to take rather longer that you would like to find sme of them. Its so frustrating when stuff that worked, stops working. In trying to solve one minis issue, I created 6 more.
The things I need to re-build when time I change kernel are
The stock vmware-config.pl script fails (at least on 2.6.15).
Don't bother to look for a downloadable update or new build on the vmware site.. It ain't there.
The required answer is to find the updated vmmon/vmnet tar files elsewhere. The current (jan2006) update is vmware-any-any-update96.tar.gz. It is available at http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/ and supposedly at http://knihovny.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/ and http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/
Application is easy
tar -xzf vmware-any-any-update96.tar.gz cd ./runme.pl
It will patch and sort out your build. After that it builds fine and it all works fine.
tpconfig no longer seems to work for me. It used to be OK on my old Dell but it wont spot the touchpad on the T41.
What does work though is the X11 synaptics driver. I grabbed synaptics-0.14.4. Its dead easy to build and install. Then hack a few lines of magic into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and sanity returns.
The minimum magic I needed to stop taps is
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
Sound stopped working or sound doesn't work. There seem to be quite a few reports of this on the net, but few clear answers.
It had always worked fine, out of the box on my old 2.6.5 kernel. However it was dead as a dodo in everything I tried I couldn't get a peep out of the speakers from any source. Sound is just another bit of linux thats obfuscated and hard to debug.
To get it working again, after many hours of frustration, turned out, as usual to be really simple
amixer set 'Headphone Jack Sense' off amixer set 'Line Jack Sense' offI got there playing with gamixer and a pair of headphones. Why changing the kernel did this I have no idea.
Useful tips, record from it with
arecord -f cd -D plughw:1,0 -t wav file.wav
play to it with
aplay -D plughw:1,0 file.wav
And set the switches on the back to "Advanced Driver: ON"
Note that it needs plughw not hw.
I have no idea why, or even how I managed to work that out..
xmms works fine
Just go to the preferences window (mine appears in the menu as "Visualization plugins"), select the "Audio I/O Plugins" tab.
Set the Output Plugin to "ALSA 1.2.10 output plugin [libALSA.so]", select configure and set
the "Audio Device" to "plughw:1,0".
realplayer even plays to it if you get the right environment defines. Note that if the
3FX is your second audio device (ie plughw:1,0) then real will find it of you do
export AUDIO=/dev/dsp1
$ export PA_ALSA_PLUG=1before running audacity then just select hw:1,0 in the preferences dialogue. Apparently works for audacity>=1.3 compiled with port-audio-v19.
WEP works fine. I'm still working on WPA.
Scan mode is broken in the ipw2100 driver. I have a partial fix here. This will scan and not segfault anymore, but it seems to loose its wireless conection when it does. It will also not scan if its in WEP mode.
This patch also adds back in the ifname module parameter.
Note: The orinoco driver does not compile with the ieee80211 headers installed (heremes/orinoco/symbol) Also the atmel driver
I get errors like
Jan 5 01:32:59 localhost kernel: usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 71 Jan 5 01:33:00 localhost kernel: usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 77 Jan 5 01:33:01 localhost kernel: usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 78or in the older kernels
Dec 16 13:05:14 localhost kernel: usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using address 9 Dec 16 13:05:15 localhost kernel: usb 1-3: device not accepting address 9, error -71 Dec 16 13:33:57 localhost kernel: usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using address 10 Dec 16 13:33:58 localhost kernel: usb 1-3: device not accepting address 10, error -71Simple answer
modprobe -r ehci_hcdThey work fine with the 'slow' (uhci_usb) driver. There is a suggestion this is a hardware bug on a number of IBM systems.
It is hard to describe the effect, but basically it all tears
horizontally. Imagine that each line of the display is offset
horizontally (about +/-32 pixels) randomly and the offset is different
for each refresh cycle.. Sometimes the whole display will blank for a
coule of seconds. Severity varies, sometimes its just a few lines,
sometimes its the whole screen.
Ratoc CB31 Ultra-SCSI Cardbus card
More of a cardbus/FC2 issue than anyting else, but in case its of use
to anyone else I put the info here.
You no longer need the special CB31 driver - so don't bother to port it! The card works fine with the advensys SCSI driver. If you insert the card it is not seen/registered but does show up in lspci output. Just
modprobe advansysand there it is..
So you don't want the bother of the modprobe.. Ok then just apply this patch to the advansys.c driver, rebuild and re-install all and it will auto load. Note: you do not need to change any pcmcia config files at all. See my Cardbus howto if you want to know why.