Constant in opal.

[reddragdiva]

I've installed Debian testing on my Thinkpad 560X. Spent a few days beating it around, filing a bug, installing packages piecemeal and cursing its Unixlike nature — insofar as it's as luxurious as a bare-metal Land Rover and the only comfort is what you bolt on by hand, probably including seats and suspension.

However, it is L*n*x and so can run the network card and probably the sound system. And Debian does seem at least semicoherent. I am posting from it right now, and my goodness Firefox looks odd with twm. I must investigate WiFi drivers. x11vnc is also very tempting.

(Question: I set it up with a FAT32 partition first and ext3 second. Can I use parted to merge the FAT32 space into the ext3 partition without fucking it up? Also, is there a package of laptop goodies, such as power management?)

Update: And in further happy news, my laptop's battery now appears to hold a charge! I'll be doing some reliability tests, of course ...

Comments

[oscarhocklee.livejournal.com]

What sort of laptop goodies would you like?
There are various things that are good - apt-cache search laptop helps.

[oscarhocklee.livejournal.com]

Oh, and if you want to get suspend to disk working, give me a shout. It makes a *huge* difference.

[reddragdiva]

I think that's what I was after ;-)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

apt-<obscure> might vomit an enormous list of alternatives, choosing some odd selection will make it all work...

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

I /think/ that ext3 is resizable as long as the start point doesn't move. The parted docs ought to mention this somewhere. If the FAT partition is before the ext3 one, you may be out of luck.

As far as power management goes, if you want suspend and resume to work on something of that vintage, your best bet is APM. Install apmd, and stuff should pretty much just work - as long as you're using 2.4, anyway. 2.6 seems less solid with apm, and acpi is still somewhat (a-ha ha ha) flaky.

[reddragdiva]

"If the FAT partition is before the ext3 one, you may be out of luck."

Yeah, that's what I thought. Bugger.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

You're a w33n13 (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=alt.tech-support.recovery+OpenBSD+crib&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&selm=slrn99jljv.3q8.fun%40blowtorch.softcell.com.au&rnum=1).

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I really should have used this icon for that post.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

The 560 series are pretty close to the 570 series, IIRC. I've had RH7.3 and now FC1 running on my 570E for as long as I've had it, and everything's always Just Worked, except:

DO NOT USE LM_SENSORS. Or at least don't without reading README.thinkpad (http://www2.lm-sensors.nu/~lm78/cvs/browse.cgi/lm_sensors2/README.thinkpad)!

You'll also want the Thinkpad configuration tool tpctl (http://tpctl.sourceforge.net/). It has a lot of useful bits to do what the Windows Thinkpad extensions do, mostly BIOS control.

(Hardware) suspend always Just Worked on mine too.

No idea re the partition bits.

[reddragdiva]

I was actually hoping to whack Fedora onto it (we do plan to sell the surplus laptops, and I see no reason not to send them out into the world crawling Fedora rather than bare), except I couldn't figure out how to install the fucker without a bootable CD drive.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

I've got a base station for mine, so I didn't run into that problem, but hrm -- you've got a USB CD drive, or none?

[reddragdiva]

This one has a base station, but I think said base hasn't a CD-ROM drive. The CD-ROM drive we have is PCMCIA. This is easy with boot floppies but less so when there's no such creature. In any case, there's still no CD boot option in the BIOS. Unless there's other boot floppies I can use to boot-manage the PC-card CD-ROM.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

Hrm, there's a boot floppy for FC1. Install that and upgrade from there, maybe?

The 2.6 kernel is too big for a floppy. :-(

[hserus.livejournal.com]

wifi drivers - take a look at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net if you cant find linux drivers for your wifi card, but have windows drivers handy.

if gnuparted doesn't work try ranish partition manager, for your fat32 / ext3 stuff.

in fact i'd have suggested a very light install of slackware (zipslack or something similar) rather than deb*an testing.

try fluxbox for something that's slightly heavier than twm - but looks pretty good.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Don't know how aware you are of debian security policies and the (supposedly imminent) migration of sarge(testing) to stable. I love Debian --- it's just so easy to work with and maintain.