Laptops :: Thinkpad 365X (a work in progress)



I dug my long lost and forgotten thinkpad 365x out of the attic and gave it a whirl with DSL.  At the time of install the machine only had 16 megs of ram.  The only cd-rom that I have for the machine hooks to a scsi pcmcia card.  I cannot find a knoppix boot disk that will recognize the setup.  I used partition magic to shrink the w95 partition down so I had 500 megs of unallocated space.  I copyed the directory and contents of \KNOPPIX directory to my windows C drive. I created a boot floppy from the DSL cd.  It booted up.  It ran extremely slow.  I tried a dsl hd install and every time it would freeze.  I gave up for the moment.  I ordered a 32 meg chip of ram for a song on ebay.  Now the laptop has 40 megs of ram and dsl runs fine.  It is alot faster than with 16.  The hard drive install went without a hitch.  That extra ram helped tremendously.  W95 evens flys on the thing.  A friend gave me a pcmcia ethernet card.  This laptop surfs the net pretty well with Mozilla for windows.  The ethernet card is a black sheep.  I barely found the w95-96 drivers for it.  No luck with linux and this network card.  I have not gotten the sound to work with DSL but I have not been able to devote much time to the effort either.  I need to scrouge up either a ethernet or a wi-fi card the dsl can use turn key.  Then I can remove w95 and be  100% microsoft free on this little machine.  It has a small display but it is bright and clear and DSL fill the screen at 800 by 600 like it should.  The keyboard is nice to type on.  I just wanted to tell anybody who is interested how to get DSL running on a thinkpad 365x.  I will post the sound solution when I figure it out.

maudite
The thinkpad 365x uses a ensoniq 1688 audiodrive chip.  I took a peek at all the sound modules.  1688 was not listed as far as I could tell.  I tryed to load what appeared to be some other ensoniq modules.  They did not load.  I remembered that the sound in windows has a soundblaster emulation.  I tryed using a SB module as follows........"modprobe sb".  To my suprise it worked.

I do not have a clue how to setup a hd install to automatically do a "modprobe sb" during bootup.  Does anyone know how to help me?

Also, early in the boot process the OS complains the I passed an undefined mode number and wants me to look at a list.  I always give it a "0" and it boots away.  Is there a way to circumvent this also?

maudite
Quote (damnsmallbankaccount @ Jan. 14 2004,17:29)
Also, early in the boot process the OS complains the I passed an undefined mode number and wants me to look at a list.  I always give it a "0" and it boots away.  Is there a way to circumvent this also?

That boot message depends on your system not supportting a framebuffer resolution of 1024x768. You must edit an parameter starting with vga= in your lilo.conf file.

Search the board. The answer is there ;)
Well
I have an Ascentia laptop and bantam backpack parallel port cdrom
i can't find a redhat 6.1 iso and don't want to dl all the files and make my own.. . . can DSL install from parallel port cd drive?
damnsmallbankaccount, If DSL is installed to your HD, and not runnign off of the CD,  I think if you can edit the /etc/modules file and add

sb

to the list of modules there, it will load at boot.

JP
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