Thinkpad 365X (a work in progress)Forum: Laptops Topic: Thinkpad 365X (a work in progress) started by: damnsmallbankaccount Posted by damnsmallbankaccount on Jan. 14 2004,03:49
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 Posted by damnsmallbankaccount on Jan. 14 2004,22:29
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 Posted by fparri on Jan. 15 2004,00:14
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 ;) Posted by Brandon Payne on Jan. 15 2004,16:47
WellI 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? Posted by donkey wrestler on Feb. 01 2004,21:45
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 |