IBM ThinkPad 570E

Overview:

This is a description of the Linux usage on an excelent IBM ThinkPad 570E laptop. It is small, nicely-designed and of a high quality. I'm using Debian, so all relevant config files locations etc. in the text below are related to this distribution (at the moment Debian GNU 3.0 Woody). My HW is:

Model: 2644 6AG
Pentium III 500Mhz
Intel 440ZX chipset
192M SDRAM
Neomagic 256AV Graphic card
Texas Instruments PCI1450 PCMCIA controller
Crystal CS46xx audio
Lucent Winmodem
Xircom RealPort Ethernet 10/100 (RE-100) pcmcia card

I'm also using ultra bay (the belly of my laptop) with cdrom + floppy or the second battery instead of the floppy and with port-replicator including 10/100 ethernet card (intel ee100) and two more pcmcia slots.

PCMCIA cards I have tested:

Xircom Real port lan, lan/modem combo
Cisco Aironet wireless lan

LSPCI: (out of dock)

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX Host bridge (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX AGP bridge (rev 03)
00:02.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1450 (rev 03)
00:02.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1450 (rev 03)
00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24
00:06.0 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:06.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:06.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:06.3 Bridge: Intel Corp. 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03)
00:07.0 Communication controller: Lucent Microelectronics WinModem 56k (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Neomagic Corporation [MagicMedia 256AV] (rev 20)

Instalation

I only used the first bootable CD from the official Debian CD-set and then I went on with network (apt). X11 is not a problem because neomagic is supported in Xfree for a long time. I'm using 16 bpp. You can also use 24 bpp but without acceleration support. The built-in pointer works in the same way as a standard PS2 mouse and when you have setuped it in BIOS, you can use simultarily both, external PS2 mouse and internal pointer. After installation I compiled my own 2.4.20 kernel.

Sound

Soundcard is supported in kernel OSS, use just:

CONFIG_SOUND=yes
CONFIG_SOUND_FUSION=yes

IRDA

Again, no problems there. Just compile to your kernel:

CONFIG_IRDA=y
CONFIG_IRLAN=y
CONFIG_IRNET=y
CONFIG_IRCOMM=y
CONFIG_IRDA_ULTRA=y
CONFIG_IRDA_CACHE_LAST_LSA=y
CONFIG_IRDA_FAST_RR=y

Probably you will not need all of them, depending for what you would like to use your IRDA. And then compile this as a module:

CONFIG_NSC_FIR=m

After that you will be able to work with it. What is important is:

/sbin/insmod nsc-ircc dongle_id=0x09 
# very importnt parametr for nsc-ircc.o. 
# on this laptop, without it, irda would not work.
/sbin/ifconfig irda0 up
/bin/echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/irda/discovery

After that I had no problem to establish PPP connection through IRDA and my Nokia 6210 phone. With "AT+CBST=81,0,1;+CHSN=6,0,0,0" string I can use HSCSD, which is a technology supported by my phone and GSM operator as well. For other stuff see IRDA-Howto.

USB

USB works fine. It is supported in standard kernel tree. I do not expect you could have any problems with it.

PCMCIA

PCMCIA started to work early during installation process and works fine till today. I tested a few types of Xircom PCMCIA lan and lan/modem combo cards. It worked perfectly.

On the RIPE meeting I borrowed Cisco Aironet WIFI adapter. It worked also fine, just "plug and play". For your reference see my config (as you can notice, it is nothing special there):

(bacil).root:/usr/src/linux# cat /etc/default/pcmcia 
# Defaults for pcmcia (sourced by /etc/init.d/pcmcia)
PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=i82365
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=
CARDMGR_OPTS=

Lucent WinModem

When we bought this laptop, there was no support of this sw modem for Linux. Right now the situation is quite diffrent. Now, it is "ltmodem-8.26a9" driver from http://www.heby.de/ltmodem project page. I followed "Readme" instructions and my modem works fine. I only loaded modules lt_serial and lt_modem. After that, there is /dev/ttyLT0 and it works like standard serial port with HW modem. After that, there was no problem to establish PPP conection throuh this modem.

Ethernet card in Port-Replicator

It is standard Intel Ether Express pro card, so the driver from the standard kernel tree worked fine. My driver is compiled in my kernel. When I'm in my office with laptop in UltraBay with Port-Replicator, the kernel recognizes the card during booting and I'm using this card for lan connectivity.

At home I have only a naked notebook, so the card is not recognized by kernel, and I'm using PCMCIA Xircom eth card there. It's fine, because Port-Replicator lan card and PCMCIA card configs are different and I do not have any changes in IP settings at home and in my office.

Power Management

Just compile APM to your kernel and it will be working fine.

By martin@lipisky.cz 29.3.2003

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