[3530] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Status of IBM Laptop issues: Good enough to go live!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Pam Huntley)
Wed Sep 25 14:12:01 2002
To: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Michael Schmedlen <mschmedl@us.ibm.com>, owls@MIT.EDU,
release-team@MIT.EDU, Steven Sakata <ssakata@us.ibm.com>,
Steven Stiles <sastile@us.ibm.com>,
Victor R Rios <riosvic1@us.ibm.com>,
"Caroline Patzer" <caro@us.ibm.com>
Message-ID: <OF5DE20B57.C274EED3-ON87256C3F.0004D805@boulder.ibm.com>
From: "Pam Huntley" <phuntley@us.ibm.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 14:11:55 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Hi Bill,
Thanks for all the feedback about your efforts to get Linux working on
ThinkPads. I'm glad you got recovery working, even if I did (oops :-/)
forget to mention the unhide/hide option. As far as the lower priority
items go (auto-suspend, screen blanking), I am tracking all of them, and
hopefully I'll be able to find some solutions for them. We have limited
resources, so I can't commit to any fix timeframe, but I can keep you
posted on what we come up with.
For the high-priority items, such as the third button in the TrackPoint not
working, we are actively working on this, and have some information that
may be helpful.
Right now, for the third TrackPoint button, we have a partial fix. There
is a patch for X (and another one for gpm) that will enable the third
button of the TrackPoint when the TouchPad is enabled. The gpm patch works
fine, however the X driver has one problem - it doesn't work after
suspend/resume. You have to restart X before it works again. We've got
the people who did the driver modifications looking at it, hopefully the
fix won't be too long in coming.
I should also mention that if you only use the gpm patch, you can get X to
look at the cleaned-up output of gpm, instead of /dev/psaux, and get the
third button to work that way. This is a lot more work, and definately a
hack, but if you are interested in this, let me know and I can sent you
detailed instructions.
You can get the X patch and detailed information from the "Synaptics
Touchpad" section of the Linuxcare certification below:
http://www.linuxcare.com/labs/certs/ibm/thinkpad/t30/rh73-config.epl
The gpm patch doesn't appear to be available from that site yet. If you
are interested in it, please let me know and I'll send it to you.
Just FYI - the issue is that the TrackPoint is a "guest" mouse of the
TouchPad. All the data from the TrackPoint gets passed through the
TouchPad, and it's encapsulated rather weirdly. If you disable the
TouchPad, the TrackPoint works fine, because its data is no longer getting
"passed through". The specification for this pass-through mode has been
released by Synaptics, and a driver patch has been written which should be
in future versions of gpm and the synaptics X driver. The only stickler
right now is the suspend issue, which may (I need to test) be worked around
with X listening to /dev/gpmdata instead of using the synaptics X driver.
About the Wireless card not working straight out of the box - I've checked
with our Preload test team, and they have not seen this problem at all. Of
course, they only test a Windows-only environment. I've sent a note out to
the person who does the hardware testing for the Wireless card to see if
there is any special initialization that has to be done. I'll let you know
what I find out.
If you are seeing this problem right out of the box, before you even resize
the windows partition, I suggest checking the IBM support site for updates,
or calling the IBM Support center. They would be the best resource for
fixing issues that aren't specifically Linux related.
About hibernation. Linux NTFS support is sketchy at best, and Microsoft is
actively going after anyone that tries to improve it. So, for hibernation
under Linux, you have to use a dedicated partition instead of just a file
on an NTFS partition. According to the information I have, the
hibernation support you see in Windows XP is different from hibernation
support in the BIOS. I have been told (again, I haven't tested it yet)
that once you add a hibernation partition, the bios will recognize it and
use it, and Fn-F12 will also work. I believe you can also configure
windows to use this hibernation partition, once it is present and properly
formatted. Please be advised I've only started testing this, so, your
mileage may vary.
Good luck with your Athena project... I have to say that I'm also working
on my master's part time at N.C. State University, and our Realm Kit is
almost completely based off of Athena.... :-D
Please keep me posted as to your progress, and I'll let you know as to our
progress, especially the mouse driver fix.
Thanks!
Pam
============================================
Pamela Huntley, IBM PCD Software Development
Phone: (919) 543-3598 Email: phuntley@us.ibm.com
Bill Cattey
<wdc@MIT.EDU> To: Pam Huntley/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS, owls@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
cc: Steven Sakata/Waltham/IBM@IBMUS, Victor R Rios/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS, Michael
09/24/2002 08:26 Schmedlen/Hamden/IBM@IBMUS, Steven Stiles/Minneapolis/IBM@IBMUS
PM Subject: Status of IBM Laptop issues: Good enough to go live!
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
