Benedikt Heinen a30p@here.ch
In short - I like the new machine.... ;)
Especially those new Flexview displays are really cool - not just from the resolution (I had the same resolution on an A21P before), but just from the screen itself. The new displays have a picture much more like a "normal" CRT judging from the colors and viewing angles...
The machine in question has the following key features:
The notebook has been set up with Win2K in a 5GB partition (original 47GB windows partition resized with Partition Magic), the "IBM work area" in "hidden" a 1GB partition (unchanged original install), and linux set up with a "rescue" system in /dev/hda3 (512MB), the system root partition in /dev/hda5 (512MB) and all other partitions inside LVM (40GB).
YES, I know, LVM looks like overkill on a notebook, but I like to have the ability to easily create, resize and remove partitions again, and for that, LVM seems the easiest way...
Windows partition and "IBM work area" or FAT32 partitions, my "rescue system" /dev/hda3 is on ext2, all other partitions are XFS (requires kernel patch)..The latter for two reasons:
- performance: XFS is in my experience so far, the fastest file system, the the less long the disk runs, the more it keeps for battery - on the other hand, yes, journal writes will create additional writes, but in all, on my previous notebooks (IBM TP 600E, IBM TP A21P), xfs seemed to create a little more battery life time (but - only just a few minutes on a full charge)...
- crash-recovery: Since the file system is journalling, I will get around long fsck runs in the event of a system crash (may they never happen anyway... ;)
ATI Radeon Mobility: DRI didn't work straight away. Since linux kernel 2.4.18, this is working though. Note: to get DRI support properly working, I also needed the gatos drivers ("ati.2" drivers for X11, and drm-kernel for the radeon kernel module).
Originally, the machine had occassionally had a problem of the screen flickering - but only very briefly once every hour or so. This had been solved by a system BIOS update.
Sound (i810_audio.o or ALSA snd-intel8x0.o): both work out of the box...
USB (uhci.o): works out of the box...
Firewire (ohci1394.o): works out of the box...
PCMCIA (pcmcia-cs-3.1.21): Works out of the box...
Fast Ethernet (eepro100.o / e100.o): Linux kernels 2.4.17 and before seem to have trouble with the built-in ethernet, causing lots of timeouts, and /var/log/kern.log will have lots of
eepro100: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!lines...
Intels' own driver (e100.o; see Debian package e100-source) works fine for the older kernels, though.
Since 2.4.18, also eepro100 works...
Wireless LAN (prism2_pci.o from linux-wlan Project): Well, this one sort-of works... e.g. I have got it basically working, but occasionally I seem to have terrible performance problems (e.g. I only get 18kb/s. These problems turned out to be problems in the Wireless Access Point. Upgrading the access point's firmware solved this issue. (see: problems (Wireless LAN))
CD-RW: works. Requires kernel to have SCSI support and in IDE "SCSI emulation support" and an extra boot option (or module load option, if compiled as a module) of "hdc=ide-scsi" (in lilo.conf use
append="hdc=ide-scsi". After that, cdrecord can be used to (re)write CDs...
Bluetooth: untested (I don't have any Bluetooth devices to test it with...)
IR: untested (I don't have any IR devices to test it with...)
Any help on these would be highly appreciated! Just feel free to email me at a30p@here.ch If you have any more information on these...
occasionally the screen goes off and back on again in within a split second - and no - this shouldn't be the screen saver, as this also happens, when I'm in the middle of typing something...
Very rarely, the screen starts to continously flicker off and back on again -- I assume, that the two problems are related, but that part can be wrong, of course. What I noticed though, when this flickering occurs, switching off the screen (Fn+F3) and turning it back on fixes that. But - it's annoying nonetheless.
Both of these problems were solved with a simple system BIOS update.
Suspend works, hibernation doesn't... No error message, nothing - hibernation just doesn't react at all...
In the meantime, I have received some more information on how to get hibernation to work; I just haven't tried that myself as of yet (due to lack of a FAT32 file system). So, in case you'd like to try this, proceed with caution!
You need a FAT32 partition of about 300 MB (if you have 256 MB RAM).
Download stndalhd.exe from IBM homepage.
Run stndalhd.exe in a dos window to create a diskette.
Boot from a MS-DOS- od WIN9x recovery diskette.
Change diskette to the extracted IBM floppy.
Run "phdisk create file"
Reboot in DOS-Mode and try to hibernate <Fn>-<F12> - it should work now.
I can't get the full bandwidth out of the driver. People on the linux-wlan mailing list suggested possible hardware conflicts, but I am so far not able to locate these.
Latest driver tested is linux-wlan-ng-0.1.13pre4.
Note: This "occasionally" works fine... I have yet to figure out, why the driver goes at full speed at one time, and at ~3-4% of the full speed the other... :/
Solution: This turned out not to be a linux problem after all. I just never use Windows long enough, otherwise I would have noted, that this is present in there as well. To solve the problem, I had to upgrade the firmware in my Wireless Access Point.
According to /proc/apm, the machine "only" has ~85mins of battery life time if the machine is idle, which is far from the ~2 1/2 hours, IBM advertises. I see, that the additional RAM and such might cost some battery life, but the IMPACT of full RAM was negligible on the TP600E (288MB) and A21P (512MB) I had before; so I am wondering, what's wrong here...
Note: In the meantime, I've heard, that on these machines the RAM really does come at a large cost in battery... This sucks... :-(
Also, the additional drive bay battery doesn't seem to "add" additional lifetime to the system - at least, not according to /proc/apm - and that's something I find rather strange...
Also - apmizer doesn't seem to change this time noticably...
BUT So far, I have mainly operated the machine on AC power, and only had short times on battery power... So I can't really say how "realistic" the ~85mins are, and whether the notebook will live that time, even shorter, or longer...
...or whatever you might want to call them...
...seem pretty dead and unusable so far...
...but this is only a minor problem for me... ;)