RedHat Linux on IBM Thinkpad A30p

In October 2003 i found on ebay a dealer not so far away which sold me a 2653-64G incl. more than 15 months of warranty.

My A21P went to my wife Bea, and i changed the 4xCDRW/DVD with my newer one from the A21P (Ultrabay).

Hardware

Device	Description
CPU	Intel Pentium III mobile 1200 MHz
Memory	1024 MB (2x512)
Video	ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY AGP 2x, TV-Out SVideo, TV-in/TV-out, 32 MB RAM
Harddisk intern	Toshiba MK60GAX, 60GB 5400 rpm
Harddisk Ultrabay	IBM, 48GB 5400 rpm
CD/DVD	8xDVD/24xCDRW, Ultrabay2000
PCMCIA	2x PCMCIA Slots
Display	15,1 Inch, 1600x1200
Sound	82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio
Communication	Intel E100 Mini-PCI, 10/100MBit LAN and with Modem
Floppy	none
IrDA	Fast IrDA 4MBit
IEEE1394	Ricoh Co Ltd R5C522

Overview

The installation of RedHat 7.3 runs smoothly, and all hardware, except the Mini-PCI-Modem, works well. The installer detected the network-card, but the kerneldriver creates random hangups, so i downloaded the tar.gz from intel webiste and installed this one, which works well.

UPDATE 2003-11-02: Now the machine runs Fedora Core 3, no problem while installing. Performance is better with new NPTL support.

Networking

The Intel E100 Card is identified correctly, as mentioned above the kerneldriver does not work stable. The combo card with modem included, which should work with ltmodem-package, but i hadn't tested it.

Distribution

I decided to use RedHat 7.3 Professional, which i use since 2002 and which works very well for my needs, some additional packages from freshrpms.net and other sites helped to get a nice multimedia-machine.

X11

The XFree86 driver only supports 2D and does not provide any special feature like overlay and TV-Out. For DRI-support and Xv i used the Gatos X11-driver. This provides extented performance for accelerated DVD/mpeg and 3D with drm-kernel package. Also there is utility available for enabling the TV-connector, which works well.

The TV-in is not supported because chipset documentation and features seems to be under copyright. I hope someone will created a drivers in future. 640x480,800x600,1024x768,1280x1024 and 1600x1200 which is the native displayresolution works well. Mostly i use the native resolution of the LCD, but 800x600 is widely used on beamers. Next i have to test is XINERAMA which is supported by the chipset.

For more details whats enabled or not,please view my XFree-Logfile

Sound

Sound quality is good, autodetect at installation, the speakers sounds okay for a notebook. The cipset is supported by i810 kerneldriver. I did not use alsa, i found no need.

Ultrabay 2000/Plus

There are 2 Ultrabay slots, the right one holds the optical drive, the left one my second harddisk

I setup the following append-line for lilo to enable ide-scsi emulation for cd/rw at boot time
append="hdc=ide-scsi"

Trackpoint

The trackpoint works well, but i am not able to use the klick-on-press feature, i never missed it. It is a ps2 device, i use it in conjunction with my Logitech USB scrollmouse.

USB support

USB works fine, unfortunately the A30P has only one USB 1.1, i have attached a Logitech Cordless Wheelmouse, the mousewheel works okay on all programs, including shellwindows, but not in Netscape 4.79 (i never tried to solve this).

IrDA support

IrDA runs only if serial port is disabled in BIOS, after that i was able to connect my Siemens S35 and my ME45 to the IrDA, i found a software on tuxmobil.org but i have to test it another time.

NEW!
After i got my new S55 mobile with IQP-500 camera, i tried to connect my new S55 via IrDA. I used the tool obexftp to retrieve pictures from the phone, and it worked well.
I loaded the modules irda, ircomm, irtty, ircomm-tty. For obexftp i did not have to specify a device, so i don't use the "-d" parameter.

I'm able to list the directories on the phone with "obexftp -l /", and can copy/move/delete files with this tool. Many thanks to the programmers.

Sending SMS also works with scmxx and gscmxx as GUI. As Hendrik Sattler points in his documentation, the device is only partly supported (no vcard, upload bitmaps/midi) does not with this tool. I should work with obexftp.

IEEE1394 support

IE1394 runs well, but it is only a 4-pin connector, which means an external powersupply is required for the Firewire-device. I had to edit my modules.conf to autoload the module at startup

Battery

Accu works nearly 2:10 hours in normal use, when i use the DVD for viewing movies 75 minutes are able. I think this is somewhat short . I think about an Ultrabay battery but at the moment it is to expensive (about 225 Euros) for me.


Others Thinkpad specific specials

Other features work well, for thinkpad a deamon is available and software for configuring thinkpad specific options like with PS2.EXE unter DOS, i never tried it.

lspci output

All hardware, except the modem does work well and performce good for my needs.

My modules.conf file

modules.conf

My disk partition-scheme was created with RedHats Disk-Druid.

Output fdisk -l

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last updated: Mar 21 2004 11:34 pm