[BL] Thinkpad 770

baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org
Mon Mar 29 11:44:38 EDT 2010


266MHz, came with 32MB onboard RAM and 2x32MB in two slots, upgradeable to 
32 + 64 + 128 (the first slot won't recognize more than 64).  4.7GB drive.
Trident Cyber video 2MB - works as framebuffer not Xvesa or svgalib 
(screen goes black though it is supposed to support VGA).  cs4232 sound 
with SB8 emulation.  Works beautifully in Win95, good speakers.

The computer is labelled 'Designed for Microsoft Windows NT Windows 95' 
and came with BOTH, and was set to boot to your choice of NT, NT/VGA, or 
Windows (95).  NT wanted a password so I deleted it from D:.  Then would 
not boot so I deleted NTLDR and NT.COM and it complained some more, so I 
did fdisk/mbr (you can plug in a floppy drive) and sys c: (with DOS from 
Win98 since the Win95 boot floppy was bad).  Win95 still worked.

PQMAGIC refused to deal with NT SERVER.

Not sure of the exact sequence of events.

boot.ini was set to choose between DOS (bootsect.dos = C:\) and the two 
versions of NT.  I changed bootgui=1 to bootgui=0 in the Win95 boot file 
msdos.sys (attrib -r -s -h -a on that and boot.ini) so it would boot to 
DOS not Win95.  Type win to start win95.

I used Puppy Linux GParted to partition/format but then BL e2fsck would 
not work (unsupported features, too new a version of ext2) so I redid the 
partitions with BL3 floppy version and recopied (from USB flash drive 
using the 1-floppy BL from David Moberg).  One USB port, works well.

Copied over BL2 and BL3 to what used to be D: and E: and tried to boot 
them with loadlin.  Loadlin cannot find zimage (gave some message about 
not finding the kernel, FATAL, and reboot) unless you specify loadlin 
c:\bl2\zimage.  Puppy linux versions before 4.31 could not find the files 
either which tipped me off here.  4.31 kernel 2.6.30 'small' just reboots 
endlessly but 2.6.21.7 full kernel installed so it may be using some 
special drivers. ?   I did not install lilo since loadlin works.

Xvesa does not work with this Trident video.
Framebuffer works fine.  1024 16-bit.  Xfbdev.  No crashing.
Text fills the screen.

svgalib does not work at all. vgatest says it should do VGA resolution but 
it just gives a black screen (from which you can at least exit).

Nice looking LCD.

Sound:  works perfectly in Win95 but when I load what are supposed to be 
the correct modules in BL it appears to play but I cannot hear any sound.
(I did fiddle with the volume dial - but it was set to max already).

Kernel 2.4

insmod soundcore
insmod sound
insmod ad1848
insmod uart401
insmod cs4232 io=0x530 irq=5 dma=1 dma2=0  [mpuio=0x330 mpuirq=9]
[insmod opl3 io=0x380]

The parts in [ ] are optional - remove the brackets or the whole thing.

DVD drive is optional and it may have come with an add-in better video 
card.  (DVD part is dead on this one).  Supposed to play DVDs with the
faster card.  (Normally 266MHz won't do it).

Puppy Linux identifies cs4232 and loads drivers but also won't work and 
gives a bunch of error messages about not finding card '0', no such 
device, etc.  isapnp card.  Normally cs423X works in BL but not in Puppy.
I don't know how to use ALSA manually specifying io etc.

Other people had this model Thinkpad working with sound in Redhat etc.

This would make a lovely internet radio with mplayer.  Does anyone have a 
thinkpad working with BL and sound?

Some models came with mwave linmodem.  From a website discussing how to 
compile it I made need both kernel source and kernel headers to compile a 
2.6 kernel.  Will look at kernel.org for the headers for 2.6.21.7.

Two more days until it goes from lows in the low 20s F to highs in the 
high 70s - ideal programming weather.

Sindi



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