IBM Thinkpad 240X

abaumann · 2020-01-11 14:14:03

Maybe this time the raging AI gods at Google/Youtube show mercy and leave the video up.

levi · 2020-01-11 20:58:38

Nice, I never succeeded in getting any graphics running on my old coppermine p3 even after I stuck 512 MB of RAM in it, but presumably your laptop has some kind of video driver.

abaumann · 2020-01-12 09:26:46

Yeah, I'll write a installation guide, it's a SiS X driver, which works (almost) out of the box with Xorg 1.20.

abaumann · 2020-02-13 14:08:28

I lack the cable for the external CD-ROM drive. PXE was not possible (the only way to get network on this machine
is via a PCMCIA card, either Wifi or Ethernet, so, no option either). I went with the external floppy containing the PLOPP bootloader and a i686 boot ISO on a USB (because the machine has USB 1.1, but cannot boot from it).

The original harddisk was replaced with a 16 GB compact flash. The harddisk connector is a little bit proprietary, but the old broken
hard disk had an adapter on it for PATA-IDE. pcengines still provides ATA connectors for those compact flashes, so that was a
perfect match.

X11 is the only thing, which is a little bit tricky on the machine to get running:

You need xf86-video-siliconmotion for the "Silicon Motion, Inc. SM712 LynxEM+ " graphics card.
There are currently some issues around some memory corruption when playing videos on 24-bit colour depth, I suspect
it has to do with too little memory available or even some defective memory.

Xorg.conf has to be done in the classical manual style:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Trackpoint Wheel Emulation"
    Driver "evdev"
    MatchProduct "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"

    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Option  "EmulateWheel"  "true"
    Option  "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
    Option  "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
    Option  "XAxisMapping"  "6 7"
    Option  "YAxisMapping"  "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load "exa"
    Load "int10"
    Load "vgahw"
    Load "fb"
    Load "vbe"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
    Driver        "siliconmotion"
    Option        "NoAccel"
    Option        "AccelMethod" "XAA"
    Option        "UseBIOS" "false"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier    "Default Screen"
    Device        "Configured Video Device"
    DefaultDepth    16
    Subsection "Display"
        Depth       16
        Modes       "800x600"
    EndSubsection
EndSection

Option "UseBIOS" "false" is really important to get KVM text mode / graphic mode switching working.
EXA acceleration just gave me distorted graphics or hangups, so I'm setting "AccelMethod" to "XAA".
Also important is: you have to manually load all dependend X11 modules by hand, it won't load do
that automatically.

The machine has only 128MB RAM. Modern Linux kernels allocate some insane amounts of memory
for the IO-MMU (which the machine most definitely doesn't have), so set "iommu=off" as boot option
if you don't want to loose 64MB of RAM for nothing. :-)

I'm using a window manager like LXDE or notion on it. Also xterm is way too slow, so I turned to 'st'
(sucklessly). Netsurf and dillo work fine, seamonkey comes up with a swapfile, but is no joy to work
with. Modern firefox or chromium are out of question. Libreoffice works with an activated swap.
Abiword works just fine. My IDE (geany) works nicely. So I can develop operating systems on this machine
with qemu emulating them, but I can almost not open a simple web page. :-)

abaumann · 2022-11-10 11:11:53

With modern X you can now also use fbdev, just the frame buffer is currently set to

smtcfb 0000:00:09.0: 4 MiB of VRAM detected.
fbcon: sm712fb (fb0) is primary device
smtcfb 0000:00:09.0: Silicon Motion SM712 RevA0 primary display mode 1024x768-16 Init Complete.

This can be set to saner values for this display like so (fbset is in community):

fbset -fb /dev/fb0 -g 800 600 800 600 16

Bonus points for everybody who knows how to set this at boot time. :-)

The xorg.conf only contains now:

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Trackpoint Wheel Emulation"
Driver "evdev"
MatchProduct "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "fbdev"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Configured Video Device"
DefaultDepth 16
Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "800x600"
EndSubsection
EndSection

levi · 2022-11-11 09:26:26

You could write a systemd unit to do it. That should be doable, although the last time I tried to do it (play system beep before it asks tor the unlock password, for headless use) it stopped the machine booting properly. I suspect that was problems with the dependency tree, but I never got to the bottom of it. For your use, putting that fbdev line in your bashrc (or other shell rc file) would be okay, provided you're okay with logging in blind.

abaumann · 2022-11-11 17:40:43

Well, I see the top part of 1024x768, no problem there. I thought that there are video mode paramaters for the linux kernel you specify at boot time.
fbset in a unit before slim (and slim the display manager depending on it) is an option, indeed. thanks.

levi · 2022-11-11 21:24:55

That may be true, but the boot parameters are arcane and weird. Presumably you want to control some kind of graphics stack the for me at least gets fired up about half way through the boot process. I guess it depends on what graphics chip this laptop has. To be honest I've never played with the kernel parameters beyond getting the kernel load address right on some old board, and learning what the hell nomodeset does.

abaumann · 2022-11-12 08:21:28

Well, in theory https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/fb/sisfb.html should do the trick, but I never managed to make it do anything different at boot time.

levi · 2022-11-12 20:35:46

Yes, if sisfb is installed. I do not have it on my eeepc but that's nor surprising as it uses inbuilt i915 graphics. I don't know off hand how the installer decides what kernel modules to include, but it seems to have done a good job of it for me at least. I have found out that having vesafb installed stops sisfb working, but I doubt that's your problem.

abaumann · 2022-11-13 08:20:42

sisfb and all other special framebuffer drivers are in conflict with vesafb (and vesafb should probably only be used if you don't have another option).
The installer (archinstall32) is not deciding, but that's a good point, it could install the known-good setup for kernel modules and Xorg/Wayland.
Only, the sample of people with real hardware might be too small.. :-)
(Note: with sisfb I meant sm712fb here)

abaumann · 2023-11-04 09:30:03

Stopped working with "/init: mount: Value too large for defined data type" in ramdisk

ladyanita22 · 2024-12-07 01:43:16

Beautiful! Would you mind running some rust code on it?

abaumann · 2024-12-07 09:50:25

Seriously? ;-)
I could rewrite pcmciautils in Rust? ;-)

Actually - seriously, it would be a nice experiment to see how fast it is.. just a helloworld.rs or so.

Currently I cannot even boot it due to regressions..

abaumann · 2024-12-07 14:26:59

Ok, I had to add 'MODULES=(sm712fb ata_generic pata_acpi ata_piix)
as well as a small script doing 'fbset -fb /dev/fb0 -g 800 600 800 600 16' bacause the framebuffer was cut off in the terminal login.
kernel 6.12.1 runs just fine..
(side node, the database files contain the older 6.11 kernel, don't know why, the buildmaster insists on downgrading packages again
I suppose).
Also, I had to take out the compact flash and to the kernel update and initramfs creation, using PLOPP and an 686 ISO as described
above did not work anymore - or it never did?)

abaumann · 2024-12-07 15:19:05

rust works like a charm on i686. :-)

Rust Session

abaumann · 2024-12-08 15:44:44

Currently running with sm712fb and fbdev in Xorg. The siliconmotion driver on Xorg has some issues detecting the VRAM (which
should be 2MB, but the driver inststs we have 0kB). Even when botching that by hand, the driver refuses to start up, comes up
with messages like 800x600, cannot allocate for 800x800 (so it extended the virtual Y?). All really weird and I need to invest some time
another time to fix that..

Arch Linux

#1 2020-01-11 14:14:03

IBM Thinkpad 240X

#2 2020-01-11 20:58:38

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#3 2020-01-12 09:26:46

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#4 2020-02-13 14:08:28

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#5 2022-11-10 11:11:53

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#6 2022-11-11 09:26:26

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#7 2022-11-11 17:40:43

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#8 2022-11-11 21:24:55

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#9 2022-11-12 08:21:28

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#10 2022-11-12 20:35:46

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#11 2022-11-13 08:20:42

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#12 2023-11-04 09:30:03

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#13 2024-12-07 01:43:16

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#14 2024-12-07 09:50:25

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#15 2024-12-07 14:26:59

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#16 2024-12-07 15:19:05

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

#17 2024-12-08 15:44:44

Re: IBM Thinkpad 240X

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