SuSE 9.2 Pro on an IBM Thinkpad 600x
 

Before installing SuSE 9.2 Pro on my main machines, I decided to install it on an old IBM Thinkpad 600x (Intel PIII 650 MHz, 326MB memory, Neomagic graphics card with 2.5MB memory, 13.3inch TFT LCD).

Installation went smoothly. The machine had an existing Fedora Core 2 installation which I wiped out. I repartitioned the 10GB drive to have just one partition (reiserfs). I picked all the defaults in the installation figuring that I could always add software later via YAST. The system chooses KDE by default which is what I went with.

In about an hour, I had a working SUSE 9.2 Pro installation. One problem I noticed (which I saw in SuSE 9.1 Pro as well) is that after installation, the system reboots but does not tell you what to do to finish the installation. I did nothing and that turned out to be the correct thing to do. The system rebooted from the hard drive and proceeded to finish the installation.

X was messed up. I ran sax2 from the command line and picked a 1024x768 16 bit display. For some reason, the installation picked a VESA monitor which I corrected by picking a Thinkpad LCD 1024x768 monitor (nice) from the sax2 menu.

After firing up KDE, I ran into a weird problem. I could not get sound to work in KDE as a normal user. It took a while to realize that i) the soundcard (a Crystal CS466x device) had been correctly detected and YAST would play a test sound but ii) only root could change volumes using a mixer (kamix, qamix or alsamixer.) Since this meant that some permissions were messed up, I poked around for a bit and finally solved the problem by adding myself (anand) to the "audio" group! Go figure. Took a while to figure out that solution. Once I added myself to the audio group, the mixers came up without complaining and I could set sound from within kde. This isn't kde centric, just that no mixer could be configured by an ordinary user.

Minor nits and points:

1. Java 1.4.2 is installed instead of Java 1.5
2. I went with the default font settings and they look pretty bad. Also, they look wrong. In particular, "z" always looks bigger than the remaining letters.
3. The background is miserable as usual (but can be easily changed) and the main desktop fonts are rendered in black instead of white (which can also be changed). Generally the look and feel is pretty awful but obviously this is totally subjective.
4. My wireless network was recognized and DHCP configured by default. I have a Compaq WL110 card (Intersil Prism chipset) which was set up automatically (orinoco 0.13e driver).
5. I went to packman and installed MPlayer. Was able to play a DVD right away as root. Will try and play a DVD as myself (anand) since MPlayer's problems may have been related to the aforementioned (only root recognizes sound) sound problem.
6. Haven't installed apt yet but will soon. Generally, I've had bad luck with SuSE 9.1 Pro apt (as opposed to Fedora apt) and am leery to mess my system up. However, for indispensable things like dvdcss and other multimedia stuff from packman, I generally use apt.
7. There's a configure thinkpad GUI which looks interesting. It has sleep, suspend, hibermate options etc. Haven't tried them yet.
8. Firefox (0.10.1) and Thunderbird (0.8) were available on the DVD and installed without a hitch.
9. System at present has (kernel-2.6.8-24.3 (with TWO kernel updates via YOU already), xorg-X11, kde 3.3, alsa 1.0.6.

Anand

did you have any problems with the inbuilt modem ???

diddi

Haven't tried yet to get the inbuilt modem to work. With the wireless setup working fine, I didn't bother. Will check however since SuSE 9.2 Pro has an ltmodem package which sounds like the right one (from dim memory).

Anand

tp600x : suse 9.2 : apm, acpi, ltmodem, microdrive, hitachi travelstar
 

hi there ;-)

the internal ltmodem refused to work register the given kernel modules from any ltmodem.rpm i have found, it told me stories about tainted kernels and etc. i guess, it is a wrong error message, because, if you instruct the system "modprobe ltserial" everything is fine. you can include this command line anywhere you like in the kde startup files.

apm will never power off the tp600x.so tell grub in yast boot loader configuration :"acpi=force apm=off pci=noacpi". it will then even suspend when you close the lid (check yast whether this is enabled).

the palm thing : tungsten e, will, sadly, not synchronise using usb. there are some misunderstandigs between the kernel and the tungsten software. some of us have managed to find workarounds, i have not been successful yet.

connecting the microdrive over pcmcia can be nightmarish, because of mount/umount problems. it is much better to spend some money on an usb-flash-memory adapter which then connects to the microdrive.

the hitachi hdd : 20gb travelstar ic25n020atmr04-0 is the best investment i have made, it is fast, very quiet.

no problem with the sound, it just does the job out of the suse 9.2 box

:-)

Yes, I've also been able to get the modem to work in manual mode. I'm using ltmodem-8.31a8-6.5 and it works fine after I manually enter modprobe lt_modem followed by modprobe ltserial. Have not tried to autoload the modem using Yast.

Thanks. This is good to know. I've been manually suspending to disk using the kpowersave KDE applet and it seems to work most of the time.

Anand