IBM's ThinkPad 560's have been coming on the market very cheaply as older configurations have been discontinued. I couldn't resist buying one of these beautiful machines (4.1 lbs, 12.1" active matrix screen with 800x600 resolution, excellent keyboard) recently. Microwarehouse had the 560E model (type 2640 40U) with 2Gig hard drive and Pentium 166MMX CPU (256K L2 cache) for a steal. I put in a 4 Gig hard drive, added a 64MB dimm module bringing the RAM to 80MB, and installed Linux (2.0.35 kernel, SuSE 5.3). I use it for LaTeX work (preparing research papers with technical illustrations) and internet dial-up, and am stocking it with a library of postscript research articles and dissertations. Everything* works perfectly. It runs like lightening.
*Suspend and hibernate, color screen (at 800x600 by 64K colors, accelerated), pcmcia, sound, hot connect/disconnect of mouse, floppy drive, pc cards all work.. (Well, I don't use the microphone input and didn't try to see if I could set it up.)
I wouldn't have attempted all this without all of the help that Linux
laptop users and Linux
IBM ThinkPad users have put on the web, and I'm just adding my little
bit as a partial pay-back.
Here's what I did.
1. Replaced the hard drive. This of course isn't necessary, but I wanted 4 Gig and drives are getting so cheap. IBM has a downloadable Hardware Maintenance Manual (vol. 4), which gives an illustrated guide to taking apart the case and replacing the hard drive. I bought a 3.5" 4 Gig IBM Travel-Star disk at Fry's and installed it, replacing the 2 Gig drive that comes with the machine. (The manual recommends that only dealers should make this replacement.)
2. Partitioned the hard drive for Win95 + Linux. Using fdisk, I made a 1Gig DOS partition as the first partition on the disk, set it as bootable and the active partition, and ran the IBM recovery diskette and cdrom (which come with the 560E) to install all the original software that came on the 2 Gig drive into this 1 Gig partition (Drive C: to the recovery script). This procedure gives you the original install configuration.(which includes Win95, Lotus Smart Suite, etc.); it takes up nearly 700K of disk space. The "ThinkPad Features" program comes with the original install; it lets you easily reconfigure the hardware settings. The hibernate feature will also work under Linux if you use the hibernate file that is created on the Win95 partition.
The literature that comes with the 560E does not clearly indicate that only IBM cdroms are supported by the recovery disk. I have a Panasonic portable scsi cdrom drive (KXL-D720 ) with an Adaptec slim-scsi 1460A pcmcia card. Through IBM's technical support, I got a modified recovery diskette that allowed me to perform the above recovery procedure with my cdrom drive. Feel free to download it if you happen to have the same equipment. I believe that this will also work for the Panasonic KXL-D740, which comes with an Adaptec-compatible pcmcia scsi card, and is also supported by Linux.
[This procedure is a bit easier with the IBM ThinkPad 560: you just use the installed "disk factory" software to make diskettes for the Win95 OS, and then can use those plus the IBM floppies included with the machine to reinstall everything onto a partition you create on the original hard disk.]
3. Installed SuSE Linux 5.3. The SuSE 5.3 distribution has everything you need. Be sure to install APM and PCMCIA, as well as the XFree86 SVGA server.
4. Configured XFree86. Getting the screen to do 800x600dpi with 64K colors requires an http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/bresnan/ephemeral/thinkpad/XF86Config file for XFree86 3.3.2. I simply modified the configuration files from those on a web site in Japan: http://www.yy.cs.keio.ac.jp/~sanpei/note-list.html. Thank you, Yoshiro Mihira. BUT: be sure that the bios is set to the LCD display (using ThinkPad Features in Win95).
5. Compiled a fully modularized kernel with APM. The SuSE sources give you kernel 2.0.35. Have a look at my kernel configuration file. Almost everything is modularized, including drivers for the floppy, cdrom, mouse, and sound. APM should also be enabled. I made a couple of simple scripts for manually loading and unloading the sound modules, since I don't want to have sound draining the battery when I'm not using the AC power cord.
6. Compiled and configured pcmcia. To get the pcmcia to work properly, you have to make a couple of specifications in /etc/pcmcia/options and set the PCIC_OPTS in /etc/rc.d/pcmcia. Otherwise I found my pcmcia scsi card and pcmcia modem card conflicting at times. All the relevant info is in the pcmcia howto, in /usr/doc/packages/pcmcia/. Have a look at my pcmcia configurations.
7. Everything else is a piece of cake with SuSE. It's a
nice distribution. You can save yourself hours of downloading time
(over a modem) line with this distribution, and the configuration and integration
are very well done.