Since I currently have
Debian Sarge and a quite actual kernel
(2.6.17.13) successfully running on my 10 years old Pentium-1-ThinkPad
bijou, I today thought I could see, if I get the builtin infrared port
working.
Since
lspci and
lshw
didn’t help much to find out the details about the IR port, I looked
at Werner Heuser’s
tuxmobil for such information. And I was right:
tuxmobil listed all the
necessary informations:
It’s an internal serial port infrared device on
/dev/ttyS0 working without any special driver. It
seems to only need the kernel modules
irda,
sir_dev
and
irtty_sir as well as probably also the
Debian package
irda-utils.
I could immediately play around with
gnokii after configuring it ot use the right serial
port and the right drivers for my Nokia 6310i. Also sending
SMS via
xgnokii worked.
It was funny to be able to play ringtones on the phone by clicking
around on a virtual piano keyboard.
Inebriated by the success with IrDA, I decided to go on and try myself
with the notorious Mwave
DSP sound and modem card, which
came with some of the ThinkPad 760 versions including my
ED version.
This didn’t start as easy as IrDA since
tuxmobil this time
writes:
But MWave
and some other sound technologies won’t work or are very hard to get
working, e.g. booting to DOS, loading a driver, then using the
soundcard as a standard SB-PRO. So you might need a commercial sound
driver.
Well, I too often noticed that negative information about hardware
support in
Linux found on the net with a search engine often is
outdated and the formerly badly missed hardware support is available
nowadays.
So even not giving up on a 404 for a promising site, I found the no
more existing webpage of the
Mwave Project for Linux in the WayBack Archive. There
I found a still working link to
Thomas Hood’s Debian
GNU/Linux on IBM ThinkPad 600X page which mentions
tpctl, the
ThinkPad configuration tools for Linux. And happily, they’re included
in Sarge as package
tpctl. Another link still worked, too:
The one to
Dale Wick’s Thinkpad under Linux page, which tell’s what I’ve
expected: Some of the information on
tuxmobil seems to be outdated,
although Dave’s page mainly concerns the
modem
functionality of the Mwave DSP.
So I first installed tpctl on bijou, then tried to compile the
ThinkPad kernel modules from package
thinkpad-source with my
both current kernels, 2.4.33.3 and 2.6.17.13 using
make-kpkg. The modules built fine for the 2.4 series kernel, but
failed on the two latest 2.6 kernels (2.6.17.13 and 2.6.18), I’m
mainly running. So I switched over to playing around with the 2.4.33.3
kernel.
The thinkpad modules loaded fine and I get access to a lot of the
ThinkPad’s special hardware. But tpctl at least doesn’t work as
expected regarding Standby and Suspend: It has no effect while
requesting Suspend or Standby using
apm still
works fine. But nothing to see in direction sound, modem or mwave.
So I had a closer look at documentation around the mwave module. Tried
to find out appropriate I/O and IRQ settings for the module, but
what I found in the Linux ACP Modem (Mwave) mini-HOWTO
didn’t help. The module just didn’t load.
Then I noticed that module seems to need an mwave daemon. A search in
the Debian package repository found the package
mwavem. No
long thinking – installed it. But the installation script gave the
same errors when trying to load the module.
man mwavem(8) gave the reason:
Only the
3780i chip is supported. Earlier Mwave DSPs, which were used for
sound generation as well as modem functionality, are not
supported.
Also according to the
kernel
documentation for the mwave sound module, the only way to get it
making some sounds seems to be to boot to DOS, load the Windows 95
drivers, then call
loadlin and warm-boot
Linux from DOS.
So native Mwave sound on IBM 760 ThinkPads under Linux is really still
a dream while the Mwave modem is said to work nowadays.
I will continue my ThinkPad 760 journey with a closer look at the
pcspkr driver and at eBay, where I’ll look for
another 760 series ThinkPad, but with ESS1688
soundcard and no modem instead of the Mwave
DSP, e.g. a 760L, 760LD,
760EL, 760ELD or maybe also a 765L.
But I won’t do that today. It’s already much too late. Should have
gone to bed about two hours ago…
Now playing: Auld Lang Syne (monophonic on the phone :-)