Linux on an IBM Thinkpad 730T

Sold

This page used to say:

You can have my 730t, with power supply, padded cover/case, stylus, and manual. Just pay shipping. The thing is a little banged up but otherwise is in perfect working order. Write me if you are interested.

Since the unit has now been sold, that information is obsolete.

Have a nice day.

My Notes

At this point, this page is just notes for my own sake. I've been able to bootstrap Linux using a stock kernel with FPU emulation compiled in. There's a problem with handling the hard drive once Linux comes up... it seems the drive isn't being friendly about providing proper interrupts. More modern tablets (e.g. the G-1200s) make the booting drive fully emulate an IDE disk from the OS's point-of-view, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. See article below for notes concerning firing up PCMCIA card services to make the hard drive active through explicit handling of its card status.

• a thread with some ideas on the PCMCIA HDD

11/14/2001

Compiled a 2.4.14 kernel with FPU emulator included (since the 730t's 486 lacks its own FPU), and the kernel brings up just about everything properly, until it tries to do a partition check, at which point it stalls waiting for interrupts which never come, eventually timing out and panicing because it can't mount a root FS (not a problem in itself, since I haven't set up a root filesystem yet anyway).

It seems the BIOS's support for making the PCMCIA hard drive look like an ATA drive is incomplete... while it works fine for DOS, under Linux the default handler is expecting things that just aren't happening. Need to fiddle with some kernel options (compile and command-line) to see if I can tweak some usability out of it.