Thinkpad 760EL Issues

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Thinkpad 760EL Issues
started by: wallydavid

Posted by wallydavid on Mar. 31 2005,01:09

I was looking for a distro to use on an old Thinkpad 760EL and hit upon DSL. I installed it onto the hard drive while it was hooked up to the IDE channel w/o problems.

1)When I restarted it in the 760EL I was only able to get 640x480 w/4 bit color. But that is only after I shutdown X and run xsetup.sh. I choose Xvesa because if I use Xfbdev, I get an XIO error. If I use Xvesa and choose anything other than 640x480, I get nothing but various degrees of garbled screen or colors. HELP!

2) I have a CompUSA Cardbus PCMCIA NIC. It reconizes that there is a card there, as I see it mention Cardbus service starting during boot. Also, when I open the Control Panel and go to Netcardconfig, it tells me that eth0 is there. If I answer "Yes" to use DHCP broadcast it says that DHCP broadcast from device eth0 operation failed. If I set up my router to use static IP addresses and DSL to match, it does not connect. I run ifconfig and get the following info:
Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addre:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0.

It seems to me that something is not working, but I don't know what.

Can anyone give me some advice?

Thanks
Wally

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 31 2005,10:04

1. Try booting with and F3 cheatcode like

dsl vga=785

and then choose the xfbdev server.

2. I could be wrong, but I don't think that a "Cardbus" 32bit card will work with a 760EL. You might find better luck with a true 16bit PCMCIA card like the Orinoco cards.

Posted by wallydavid on Mar. 31 2005,11:15

Thanks for the quick replay. I am bummed to hear about the cardbus.

How do I boot with the F3 cheatcode? When do I hit F3?

Thanks
Wally

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 31 2005,11:24

Press the F3 key when you see the

Boot:

prompt after inserting the livecd

F3 is used to display the help menu.

Once you remember the correct code you don't need to press the F3 key anymore. You can just enter the code at the main boot:
prompt.

Posted by wallydavid on Mar. 31 2005,12:37

I don't run from the CD. I installed it to the hard drive. This model of Thinkpad does not support booting from the CD.

Can the F3 trick work from the hard drive install?

Posted by cbagger01 on April 01 2005,00:09

All the F3 key does is show the menu with the various framebuffer codes and there meanings.

You can also find them here on the "decimal" chart:

< http://www.uno.edu/~adamico/banshee/files/vesafb.txt >

So you need to edit your lilo.conf and add the line:

vga=xxx

where xxx is the desired mode.

Then run "lilo" to activate your changes and then reboot.