[3525] in Release_7.7_team
Status of IBM Laptop issues: Good enough to go live!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Sep 24 20:26:07 2002
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Pam Huntley <phuntley@us.ibm.com>, owls@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
Cc: Steven Sakata <ssakata@us.ibm.com>, Victor R Rios <riosvic1@us.ibm.com>,
Michael Schmedlen <mschmedl@us.ibm.com>,
Steven Stiles <sastile@us.ibm.com>
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Date: 24 Sep 2002 20:26:02 -0400
Message-Id: <1032913562.3619.144.camel@tokata.mit.edu>
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The urgent issue appears resolved, unless something new jumps out at me
I'm going to green light moving forward on blessing the T30 and R32
systems.
I've re-inventoried the issues. They are secondary for the most part.
(Though the scare-impact of a blanked out screen, and of a non-working
middle button can be pretty severe.)
Here is the present state of understanding:
Issue 1: Getting the maintenance partition to boot.
Status: CLOSED
Grub will boot the partition, but it must be configured to unhide the
partition.
Subsequent research turned up that F11 used the IBM loader in the MBR
which we blew away with grub.
Issue 2: SXGA+ screen blanking problem.
Status: WORK-AROUND
What' we'll tell people is to open and close the case to recover (since
that's the default suspend/resume behavior.) We'll investigate the F7
work-around as well. We'll ENCOURAGE people to disable it in their
BIOS.
QUESTION: Is there someone at IBM who is taking the lead in getting this
fixed?
Issue 3: Wireless ships broken
Status: OPEN
Priority: TBD
You may need to observe a 'fresh from the box system' to see this issue.
It's unclear how we'll document it. I'll check in with the support
folks to find out how big a problem this is turning out to be.
Issue 4: Getting hibernate to work.
Status: OPEN
Priority: Low
I believe I need to clarify this issue:
If I boot windows, and press Fn-F12, windows will hibernate to disk and
the machine will power down. This means that the hibernate capabilities
are already initialized.
If I boot Linux, the Fn-F12 key sequence is ignored.
Note: I'd really like to AVOID trying to get tpctl working for this and
other stuff.
Am I misunderstanding the proffered solution of "create a hibernate
partition"? Is it the case that the default hibernation setup (I'm
testing on a T30.) is a file in the NTFS partition which Linux cannot
see?
Issue 5: Getting auto-suspend to work.
Status: OPEN
Priority: LOW
I believe I need to clarify here.
If windows is running, after the BIOS-defined timeout period, the laptop
goes into suspend mode.
If I am running in single user Linux, after that same BIOS-defined
timeout period the laptop ALSO goes into suspend mode.
If X is running (the default state on most systems) the auto-suspend
NEVER occurs. The battery will drain to zero and the system will crash.
Going into the DPMS variables and setting monitor suspend and power down
does not seem to affect anything. (This may not be the cleanest test,
since Red Hat hooks into DPMS in an odd way: through the screen saver
option in the GNOME control panel.)
QUESTION: What is getting set such that the BIOS timeout starts getting
ignored when X runs? How can we change it?
6. Middle mouse button detection.
Status: NEW
Priority: High
I forgot this one in my previous note. The R32, having only 3 buttons
detects the mouse buttons without problem, and paste on middle button
works fine.
The T30, unfortunately, with its pair of left buttons and its pair of
right buttons detects a middle button but it doesn't work. The only
thing that seems to work for me is to go into XF86Config-4 by hand and
change Emulate3Buttons from "off" to "on".
QUESTION: What is going on here? Who should move forward on making
sure this issue is resolved. Basic mouse operation is important, and
this seems like galling teeny problem that stands in the way of total
user comfort.
----
Special thanks to Pam Huntley of IBM and Karem Limon of MIT for getting
quick and decisive resolution of the urgent issue!
-wdc
