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-   -   Mandrake 10.1 in IBM Thinkpad T23 (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/mandriva-30/mandrake-10-1-in-ibm-thinkpad-t23-300368/)

tantotea 03-11-2005 07:26 AM

Mandrake 10.1 in IBM Thinkpad T23
 
A bit of story regarding Mandrake 10.1 installation into my T23 Thinkpad.

First I installed Mdk 10.0 in order to have linux in the laptop, but it
could not start X windows. Many people also got this painful experience.

Second, I upgraded Mdk 10.0 to Mdk 10.1 in order to have X windows, but the sound
dissappeared, some icons did not show, etc.etc., I was just not satisfied.

Third, I fresh-installed Mdk 10.1. Problems still occurred, but most of them could be handled.


1.Sound

The sound was off after fresh installing Mdk10.1.
There are 2 drivers that I could use: intel8x0 and i810_audio. The latter was the
default.
I tried to use alsa. Alsa will use the intel8x0 driver.
I grabbed alsa-utils 1.0.6 rpm from the CD, installed ok, but the sound was still off.
It works however, when I used the same alsa version built from source (downloaded from
alsa-project.org).

However, at startup the alsa service shows intel8x0 *twice*. Maybe this is because
I forgot to remove the previous intel8x0 module produced by the rpm installation when
installing the module from the source.
I don't know whether or not it matters, as so far it does not seem to make problem I
let them there.


2. Wireless card - WG511 made in China.

I am using driverloader, because I couldn't get it work using ndiswrapper. When I tried
ndiswrapper, the led was on, the iwconfig was OK, the ifconfig was OK, the
WEP, essid, and everything else were configured OK, but it just failed to connect
(could not ping).

Using driverloader, whenever it failed, I just run the dldrconfig and it worked again.

However, strangely, using driverloader, sometimes the wireless was on at startup, but
sometimes it needed to be restarted (using dldrconfig) to be able to work.

Apart from this topic, sometimes when starting the Mdk 10.1, the laptop just hanged up.
I am not sure if it was caused by the wireless card but I just suspect it is.

Also, the module prism54 (which does not work with WG511 made in China) is always
loaded at startup.

So I put the following at /etc/moprobe.conf file

install driverloader /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove prism54; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install driverloader

Then, learning from linuxant mailing list, I added the following lines into /etc/rc.d/rc.local file:

dldrconfig stop
modprobe driverloader
ifup

(The rc.local script tells me that it is a script executed at the end of startup
process, that is after all other startup scripts have been executed. So, it is
logic to put the lines there.)

The card then is always on at startup.

Still, eth0 (I think this is for LAN - My wireless is using eth1) is always stuck for
some seconds at startup, the cause of which I still don't know.


3. Fonts

Default Mdk 10.1 gives ugly fonts. Thanks to Noel Llopis for writing this:

convexhull dot com/mandrake_fonts.html


4. Display

T23's chip for display is S3 Supersavage/IX.
It was detected OK by Mdk 10.1 (but not by Mdk 10.0).

However, it still could not work with openGL (slow when playing tux game).
glxgear still gives less than 150 frames per second.

When in Mdk 10.0, I tried using DRI by installing several versions of DRI from
dri dot sourceforge dot net.
I installed under runlevel 3, and the installation process was OK, but it failed to start X Windows - many "Unresolved symbols" errors occurred.
This may be caused by different version of XFree86 I am having from that used by the DRI softwares.
Until now there is no information about which DRI software matches which linux
distribution.
Hope kind folks out there could give such information.


Cheers,

tantotea

opjose 03-11-2005 08:16 AM

Re: ALSA

You SHOULD NOT re-install Alsa from source as you did.

Alsa works just fine on your laptop "out of the box".

However Mandrake mutes the mixer completely.

You need to install aumix and then set the mixer levels. That was all you were missing.

Re: WiFi

Yes Ndiswrapper works just fine out of the box.

After you installed it and got the light you were almost done!

What you needed to do at this point, is go into the MCC and configure the WiFI device.

The rest was not needed.

Re: Fonts

If you set up your URPMI sources, you can install a slew of replacement fonts which prettify Mandrake.

A lot of the posted info is for other distros.

Re: S3

The S3 chip works in 10.1, but it's unfortunately a bit braindead as a video interface.

A few additional steps are required to get opengl to work...

You actually had it up and running but the poor performance was basically due to the wrong opengl libs for your system.


While you had problems installing Mandrake 10.1 on your system, many of these problems are caused by taking advice targetted to other distributions and trying to apply them to Mandrake.

Often all of these problems have already been solved and dealt with.

Unfortunately there is no one great repository that deals with all of this, as there are so many variables.

Still asking questions here BEFORE you attempted other fixes, would have probably eased your installation.

Consider this next time, and don't be quite so quick to "blame" your experience on Mandrake...

I'm not trying to infer that you were badmouthing anything...

tantotea 03-11-2005 10:26 AM

Opjose,

Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it.

I may have missed my point here. My intention is NOT to blame Mandrake, whatsoever;
I am really thankful to Mandrake people, and to open-source community.
My intention is merely to share. It is maybe useful for somebody, or to know that somebody else has problem.

In my case currently, posting the problems in the forum before handling it is
difficult, because the answer can arrive in days/weeks while the linux needs to be installed quickly
due to my deadline. I do a lot of googling and searching when a problem arises, and
when there is no light I try to solve it my way.

Anyway, for it may have hurt people, I apologize, next time I will be more careful.

Cheers,

opjose 03-11-2005 10:47 AM

Re: Hurt

No, not at all.

As I mentioned the biggest problem is that there is no central repository of how to deal with all of this stuff.

Linux on Laptops sites do a good job, but what is really needed a sites (like these) which are specifically dedicated to certain distros, which in turn the companies should point to...

E.G. there would be far fewer new user problems if Mandrake's web site suggested coming here for help...


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