IBM ThinkPad 570 (model 2644-3AA)

Configuration

Installation

No cdrom, no ethernet, so:

• Start up Windoze
• ftp i386.tar from local RedHat mirror (approx 600MB), putting it onto a VFAT drive
• untar using WinZip

Uh oh. Doing the latter looked just fine, but RedHat didn't work at all well. I had to untar using the gnu tar from gnu tar-1.11.2a.exe

Once that was done, no problems with remaining installation.

• started with RedHat boot floppy
• installed from disk image, pointing to the VFAT drive

Startup

• To begin with, I could not get Linux to boot - it kept hanging when loading the pcmcia drivers. Eventually (in retrospect I was pretty stupid!) I started it with my ethernet card removed, and all was well. See below for details on getting the ethernet card going.

• Initially, Linux tries to start eth0 before loading the pcmcia drivers. I can't understand why that should be so – the network startup scripts should check for pcmcia first. I "fixed" it by starting pcmcia before networking:

• RedHat starts gnome, which is pretty big and ugly, wasting lots of screen real estate. I use fvwm2. To do this, I had to:
• edit /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession and add an option for fvwm2
  Look in the file for case $1 in failsafe) ... and add:
  fvwm2)
     exec /usr/bin/X11/fvwm2
     ;;
  Also look a the bottom and change the last final do-or-die option from exec xsm to exec fvwm2.
• Look in /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions. Edit the Default file and change it to /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession fvwm2. I think that will do it but no guarantees.

IBM 10/100 CardBus EtherJet

These cards are essentially the same as the Xircom CardBus 10/100 cards. See Danilo Beuche's web page for more details.

1. First start Linux without netcard installed.
Set /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia as follows:
PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=i82365
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=


I think these are overwritten by one of the rc.d scripts. Look at /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia.

2. Get pcmcia-cs-3_0_14.tar.gz
3. gunzip and untar in /usr/src
4. Define XIRCOM_CARDBUS in the clients/tulip_cb.c file
5. Get xforms-0.88-8.i386.rpm (part of RedHat Powertools collection).
Install as usual:


rpm -i xforms-0.88-8.i386.rpm

6. Add a link to the installed library, in my case

/usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so.0.88

The pcmcia package will look for /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so without the version number at the end.

7. From /usr/src/pcmcia-cs-3.0.14 do:


make config
make all
make install


8. Edit /etc/pcmcia/config to add the card. I added:


card "IBM 10/100 Etherjet CardBus"
# version "IBM", "10/100 EtherJet CardBus", "IBMC-10/100"
manfid 0x00a4, 0x0113
bind "tulip_cb"


9. Edit /etc/pcmcia/config.opts to exclude some ports. This is apparently needed for the IBM Thinkpad 600. I don't know if it's actually needed for the 570, but they seem to be very similar machines. I added:

exclude port 0x2f8-0x2ff

10. Reboot with card installed.



11. Use cardinfo to check status. In my case it shows:


IBM 10/100 Etherjet CardBus
state: ready CD Vcc Vpp
device(s): eth0
IO ports: 0x100-0x17f interrupt: 3
9:21:58 socket 1: card insertion

CNET CNF-301 10/100 16-bit network cards