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| Please introduce yourself! Tell us what kind of machine you have, | how it's configured (how much memory/disk, what accessories, etc.), | and what operating system(s) you are using. (send this to the LIST | address -- don't just reply to this message!) OK. I'll tell my story as it has unfolded so far, but forgive me if it is too long. I just bought a TP755CX, whose main claims to greatness are the Pentium processor and 800x600 display. It somes with 8Mbytes of RAM and 810 Mbytes of disk. I added a 32Mbyte RAM card, since I plan on doing big compiles, and would like to speed these up using a RAM disk. I intended to use this machine on the road, with LaTeX at IEEE POSIX meetings (for my work as Technical Editor for the IEEE POSIX.5b project) and as a development station for porting our Pthreads and Ada tasking (GNARL) implementation to Linux. I also ordered an IBM PCMCIA ethernet card, version II, which I have sent back. My plan was to ftp Slackware via the ethernet onto the disk using DOS, and install it from ther. This did not work very well, since I could not find a (DOS) packet driver for that PCMCIA card, and IBM supplies it with a male RJ45 connector. Between trying to adapt the gender of the connector and the lack of packet driver, I was frustrated enough to send the card back to IBM. I installed Slackware using a borrowed PCMCIA card from a colleague, who has a Sager 90Mhz pentium laptop machine. I have now ordered one of the Sager PCMCIA ethernet card (about half the price of the IBM card), since it apparently works OK with both DOS and Linux on the TP as well as the Sager machine. Before installing Linux, we zipped up all the preinstalled software, and ftp'd it to another system for backup, figuring we could reinstall what we wanted later. This was a mistake. If you do this, run the "disk factory" utility, and make installation disks of everything, before you start. You may want to use DOS and/or OS/2 to be able to take advantage of all the nifty DSP software. I only reserved about 200 Mbytes for DOS, and scrapped OS/2. This is not enough space to reload the software. The preinstalled stuff takes over 400 Mbytes, and has components in various directories. The only way to remove things cleanly is to use the remove-utilities provided with the software. You can't really reinstall just pieces, unless you have first used the IBM-supplied "disk factory" to make your own installation disks. (This is aggravated by the fact that the disk factory software crashes when you run it to create disks for the OS/2 windows installation.) We tried to restore enough of the DOS installation to allow us to ftp over Slackware. The result is an oversized and crippled DOS/Windows installation, with a lot of miscellaneous junk from OS/2 and other preinstalled software, that came along in the directories we restored. There is no reasonable way to get all this stuff out of there, since the uninstall utility dies if it larg chunks are already missing. It looks like I've effectively lost all the preinstalled software, unless I want to remove Linux, repartition the disk, restore the whole thing, and start over. Slackware, which I downloaded from sunsite.unc.edu, installed with no hitches. XFree86 came up with no trouble in 640x480 mode, using the XF86Config file from the TP755 FAQ. I fetched linux-1.2.11, modules-1.2.8, apm_bios.0.5, and pcmcia-cs-2.6.2, and built a new kernel. It seems to run OK. I still have the following problems: 1. APM only partly works. If I use the daemon, it does put the screen into sleep mode after a period of idleness, but it keeps the disk running, and if I use the fcn-key bindings to idle the machine, it locks up. Killing the daemon restored use of the key bindings. I don't know how to proceed on this without some documentation on the TP's apm controller and bios. 2. When you come out of X11, the tty video controller is left in a weird state. Portions of the line seem to be overwritten, and shifted slightly, so that you end up with some characters duplicated and overwritten. It is useless until you power down the system. 3. No amount of fiddling with XF86Config gave access to the 800x600 pixel mode. Looking at the clock numbers reported by the SVGA driver, from several experiments between which I used the display in 800x600 vis DOS/Windows, I see differences that indicate one probably needs to reprogram the controller to adjust the clock rate. 4. I guess I am going to have to sacrifice all the neat functionality of the DSP, including modem and sound card services, since I've not seen anything on the net about support for that under Linux. I'm most worried about problems 2 and 3, since right now my display at 640x480 is smaller than most el-cheapo laptops, with a nice big black border all around it, of unused pixels. It seems problems 2 and 3 will require mucking with the SVGA driver, for which some documentation on the programming interface to the video controller is going to be needed. I tried to get help from IBM tech support, but it turned into a waste of half a day's time on the phone. I must have talked to over a dozen people, but it was a merry-go-round. They passed me back and forth, through various phone numbers, each time eventually coming back to the same number. Right now, I need to get some real work done, so I've put it aside and am using my trust Sun workstation until I can get some more information. Besides e-mail to this list, my efforts to get more information will include a call to the IBM publications folks to see if I can find any sort of hardware reference manual for this machine. I've also asked Western Digital for data sheets on their WD90C24 chip set, which the SVGA driver seems to think is present, and am waitint to see if they help any. If you have any advice or information that might help, I would be pleased to hear from you. Prof. Ted Baker Department of Computer Science Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306-4019 phone: 904-644-5452 fax: 904-644-0058 e-mail: baker@cs.fsu.edu