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Re: Etch on a Thinkpad T23



On Sun, May 6, 2007 04:58, Jonathan Yavner wrote:
>> Well, I for one would be interested if I had a T22.
>
> Where would you look for such a product?  How would a seller of such a
> product find you without offending you with his crass commercialism?

That is a good question.  Probably the answer is that Debian needs a wiki
specific to items like this and users' crib-sheets on how various hard-
ware-specific issues have been solved.  It could be indexed by hardware
name and any useful crossindexing.  By using a wiki, the community would
be able to keep it indexed and up-to-date.

>
>> the sound system and modem
>
> I haven't tried etch on my 600E, but to make sound work under Fedora
> Core 2 I had to put these in /etc/modprobe.conf:
>     alias snd-slot-0 snd-cs4236
>     alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4236
>     options snd-cs4236 port=0x530 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0 mpu_port=0x330
> mpu_irq=7 cport=0x538 fm_port=0x388 isapnp=0

Thanks for that.  I am going to try it when I get a moment.

> I haven't bothered with the modem, but ThinkWiki says there is a driver:
>     http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/MWave_MDSP3780

That is different from the one I tried. Still, modems are history now
unless I want to run hylafax. Actually the 600E spends most of its time
in a house with no landline. And Fax is history too, anyway.

>> if someone had a DVD that would solve any or all of  those problems, I

> I'm underemployed right now and can afford to spend some time to create
> such a disk for Etch on a 600E, but I'd like to get several hundred
> dollars for such work, which means I would need to find a bunch of
> customers to share the cost.  The 600E is so old now that I doubt I
> could find enough buyers to make it worthwhile.  Also, my 600E is
> failing (which is why I bought the T23).  Only one of the RAM slots is
> still working--Fedora runs poorly with only 96 MB!

Hehe, yes.  They are getting old.  IMO, your talents would be better
used on something more current.  I was not really thinking it through
when I epressed keenness on the idea.  It is worth doing for reasonably
recent kit, but the 600E, for all that it has a better keyboard than any
other laptop I have tried, is geriatric now.

> Would you be willing to take a "dumb installer" that erases your hard
> drive and installs a tuned copy of Etch?  That would require backing up
> all your personal data beforehand and restoring after.  Also, the 600E
> usually shipped with a CD-ROM drive, not DVD-ROM, which is too small
> for even the basic set of packages, so some disk-swapping would be
> needed.

That's true.  Yes, that could be a route.  Backing up via nfs over
ethernet will work easily enough. But even that sounds like a waste
of your time unless there are a lot of us dinosaurs around.  On balance,
I'll go with trying the modprobe configuration and let the rest slip. I
use the Acer Aspire 1640Z for almost everything now, so I'd better
concentrate on solving _it's_ sound and the intractable pppd/dhclient
incompatibility.

Thanks for your help.

-- 
richard




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