From: Keith Moore (moore_at_cs.utk.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 03 1994 - 04:00:55 EST
Hard drive size: 350 Mb. The system is almost as maxxed out as
is possible: except for no color (sigh) and only 12 Mb.
I haven't tried the CD-ROM drive yet. Linux doesn't have a driver
that works with the SCSI adapter in the dock. I'll work on that
after the ether driver gets done. (I really have no interest in
using DOS...)
As for how I got Linux to run...A friend of mine loaned me a
(very slow) 386 box that already had Linux running. I patched
the kernel to wire-in the geometry of the hard-disk on my box,
since the TP750 doesn't store the geometry in eeprom like most
386 boxes. (sigh...)
Then I had to get around the problem that Linux can't read the
floppy drive (because the TP750 has an incompatible floppy
controller...). Well, Linux can read/write DOS file systems,
but these can't store the other "special" files that Linux
needs to boot (devices, files with special permissions, etc)
But someone wrote extra code (called UMSDOS) that lets Linux
store "special" files in DOS file systems also by creating
DOS files with wierd names to hold the extra information.
The same person had thoughtfully created zip-files containing
a basic Linux system encoded in this format. (the zip files
were created under DOS after having built the system under Linux,
so they could be extracted under DOS on my system..)
So I created two DOS partitions with fdisk...one to boot DOS on and
another on which to install this hacked Linux file system (leaving
most of the disk still unallocated)...booted DOS, un-zipped the hacked
Linux file system on the other drive.
Meanwhile, on my friend's 386 box, I compiled a kernel with
both the hard-disk geometry patch and the "UMSDOS" patch,
and built a Linux boot-disk that would mount the UMSDOS
file system as it's root. So then I could boot Linux up on
my tp750, and use its fdisk to create a real Linux partition,
and build a file system on that partition.
I copied all of the Linux installation stuff to DOS floppies,
booted DOS on my thinkpad, and copied all of the stuff to
the hard disk. Then I rebooted Linux and mounted the DOS
filesystem, and installed the various options of the system
>from there.
I've since made various tweaks to work around problems with
linux on this machine...for instance, Linux has code to
figure out what kind of video card you have and set the display
mode accordingly. The tp750's video confuses it and it often
sets the mode to something that the LCD can't display...like
80x60. So I configured Linux to always come up in 80x28 mode.
There's still some other wierdness that needs to be dealt with.
Like, if I halt the machine from Linux, the power switch doesn't
work and I can't turn the machine off (or do anything else, either).
The only way I could unwedge it was to unplug the ac power and take
out the battery!
Keith
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