Hardware

The Ahnve family spent the afternoon at the Stockholm Technical Museum. It was the last day of the Vintage Gaming exhibition, and man, did they have hardware to reminisce about.

I first stopped by an old Commodore Vic-20, my first computer which my dad bought me in 1983. It was running a Tetris clone, programmed by the computers owner two years ago. He also showed me the flash card add-on card I suppose he soldered himself which replaced the tapedrive. Awesome.

Some time ago I got a new IBM X40. It is now running Ubuntu Hoary and I must say that it is really an excellent piece of hardware. Everything but the SD card reader works out of the box, which of course also goes to show what a great distro Ubuntu is. Get’em both.

My old 3Com Prism54 card for some reason did not work anymore on Linux. I finally gave in a bought a new MadWifi one which worked out of the box. Sweet!

I’ve got myself a SonyEricsson P900 which no doubt is the coolest gadget ever. I’m writing this sitting on the bus while at the same time listening to some ogg tunes. Awesome!

After a lot of work my shiny new IBM R40e is up and running with almost working ACPI, internal network adapter and a 3Com 54g wireless PCMCIA card, all on Gentoo Linux.

A Mini HOWTO:

• Get an old PCMCIA card for the installation as the internal network adapter is not supported by the Live-CD
• I choose the Gentoo Stable kernel which is working great
• Do not enable PCMCIA in the kernel, emerge the pcmcia-cs package instead for continued setting up of the system.
• Get the network card driver from Broadcom, the card is a BCM-5700. Compile it and put it in the /lib/modules/*kernel-version*/kernel/driver/net/ folder. Run update-modules and modprobe bcm-5700 Add it to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.4 if needed
• Get the ISL driver for the 3Com card. Follow the instructions closely, but patch the gs-sources kernel instead. I removed the pcmcia-cs package before compiling the kernel as it provides its own cardbus implementation. Supposedly only the card drivers can be compiled, but I didn’t try that.
• Emerge the wireless-tools package. iwconfig is your friend.
• ACPI is somewhat unstable, the battery information comes and goes in a undetermistic way.
• The modem is supported by the HSF driver but that in turn does not support preemptible kernels. Choose whatever you want

I’ll probably update this as I learn more. This is posted over wireless by the way :)

I got myself a new laptop the other day, a IBM T40e. It has a pretty good price performance with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4M. While researching the laptop market it occured to me that most resellers still has not understoiod the difference between Centrino, Pentium 4M and Pentium 4. The vendor I choose happily listed the T40e as a P4 even though it in fact is a P4M.

As a Gentoo fanatic I put the Live CD in an booted - no network. The Broadcom 5700 adapter was not supported out of the box, so after trying I few innovative ideas like creating a custom LiveCD, I suddenly realized that I could use my old Xircom card in the PCMCIA bus. Sometime the easy solutions are really hard to find, and sometimes I’m just a dork for not seeing them. This time it was the latter.