Armando L. Caro Jr.
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Software | Linux on IBM Thinkpad 750Cs
Intro
    I played around with Linux on an IBM Thinkpad 750Cs in 1999-2001 (yes, it was old even then with a 50Mhz processor, 12Mb of RAM, and 300MB hard drive). It was fun, and I learned a lot trying to get a minimal install that included X. I first installed Slackware Linux 3.5, kernel 2.0.34 (libc5 based) with XFree86 3.3.2. Later I installed Debian Linux 2.2, kernel 2.2.17 (libc6 or glibc based) with XFree86 3.3.6.

    On this page, I am offering help on a couple of things which were not straight forward when I first installed Linux on this machine. I cannot remember the details of how I got everything installed, but I can tell you it took lots of patience! Feel free to ask me questions, but I am warning you... I remember very little about what I did.

Floppy Drive
  • To enable the support for the ThinkPad 2.88 MB floppy drive:

    • at the LILO: boot prompt, type the option floppy=thinkpad
    or
    • add append="floppy=thinkpad" in lilo.conf
XFree86
    The IBM Thinkpad 750Cs uses a dual-scan mode that creates problems for XFree86. Fortunately, Michael Steiner patched XFree86 3.2 to get it to work. I tweaked his patches for newer versions of XFree86 (3.3.2 and 3.3.6). If you would like to use a newer version of XFree86, you may try using either the 2 patches or the pvg_driver.c provided to attempt to patch the newer version. However, you are on your own with this, because these may no longer work with a newer version of XFreee86.

    Finally for configuring X, I have provided two config files: XF86Config.TP750Cs, XF86Config.TP750Cs.DockedMonitor. The first config file is simply for the laptop itself. The latter config file is for a monitor attached to the docking station.

Armando L. Caro, Jr.