Linux on the IBM ThinkPad 390E

Please do not mail me with general ThinkPad/Linux questions to me; instead send them to the linux-thinkpad mailing list.

Although I absolutely love the machine itself (it seems that everyone loves ThinkPads), it hasn't been a smooth ride getting Linux working on it.

APM

This was the biggest problem of all -- I wasted probably at least 100 hours on it. The problem was that APM worked pretty well ... until you wanted to use PCMCIA cards. The PCMCIA modules caused no problems, but if you loaded cardmgr, every time you resume from a suspend the machine either hung or the CPU slowed to a crawl (usually the former since I upgraded to 2.3.3ac3 and the latest PCMCIA stuff). Nightmare. I even tried the 02-Jun-99 snapshot of the PCMCIA beta code, which was supposed to fix at least one fatal resume/suspend bug, but still no luck. The curious thing was that even if you unloaded cardmgr before suspending, the problem still occurred.

However, I finally cracked the problem! After all that effort, it was a simple BIOS upgrade which solved it, despite the change log for the new BIOS not mentioning anything which sounded like it would be a fix. Ah well, you live and learn ... I'm a very happy boy now anyway! So, if you're having problems, make sure you have the very latest kernel, BIOS, and APM driver.

Sound

The card is an ESS Solo-1. The OSS drivers work fine, but I refuse to pay for a licensed copy, so I and others have been working with the wonderful guys at ALSA to get their code fully working for the Solo-1 ... and it now does! There used to be problems with stuttering during playback of MPEG3s, but I discovered that a BIOS upgrade (yet again) fixed this ... as long as I don't use the modem! Allin's and Craig's pages below have great info on this and other alternative sound drivers, e.g. at the time of writing, one has just appeared in the very latest kernel!

It's worth mentioning that the CD audio is hardwired to the audio out, so you can play CDs without any sound drivers installed.

X11

X11 has posed no problems for me at all; my 1024x768 14" display at 16bpp colour depth is a true pleasure to behold, although I have heard of others who have had problems. If you're one of them, I probably can't help you, unless you forgot to supply the -- -bpp 16 option to startx :-)

At the time of writing, I'm using the RedHat RPM XFree86-SVGA-3.3.3.1-52. Here's the relevant bit of my XF86Config, in case someone's interested:

Section "Monitor"
   Identifier      "My Monitor"
   VendorName      "Unknown"
   ModelName       "Unknown"
   HorizSync       31.5-57.0
   VertRefresh     50-90
   Modeline  "1024x768"   75.00 1024 1048 1184 1328 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync
   Modeline  "800x600"    60.75 800 864 928 1088 600 616 621 657 -hsync -vsync
   Modeline  "640x480"    36.00 640 696 752 832 480 481 484 509 -hsync -vsync
EndSection

Lucent Winmodem

New! [29/12/2000] Great news! My old Compaq PCMCIA modem just packed up, and in desperation I downloaded the latest (5.78c) semi-binary release of the Linux driver kernel module from http://walbran.org/sean/linux/stodolsk/, which is Lucent's official binary module with several improvements hacked in ... and it worked like a dream first time! Well, that is, once I realised that my parent's phone's cable is not a modem cable, even though it has identical gizmos at both ends. Duh :-( This is with the stock RedHat kernel-2.2.16-3 rpm, incidentally. CPU usage seems to be negligible, as predicted by various web pages, and performance seems every bit as good as my old PCMCIA modem, if not better. Head over to linmodems.org/ for more information; interestingly John Carmack has predicted that `a linmodem may be able to have a lower latency than a controller-ful modem'.

TrackPoint

The TrackPoint surprised me; I thought I'd hate it but I've really grown rather fond of it. Granted, it's not as quick as a mouse, but it's not at all awkward once you get used to it, and it's damn convenient because you never have to move your hands away from the touch-typing position. I think I prefer it to the touchpad type of pointer device which most laptops have.

Getting it working under Linux required literally no effort. It behaves just a straight-forward 3-button PS/2 mouse. Likewise if you want to use an external PS/2 mouse, just plug it in, (re)start X11 (or restart gpm, or both), and hey presto, it works.

It looks like it's maybe finally possible to achieve identical behaviour to the Windows 98 driver, which allows you to emulate a click just by pressing on it (pointless) and to emulate a scroll wheel by holding the middle button and moving it up and down (very useful), although I haven't tried yet. Have a look at this Linux Trackpoint Utilities page for more details. (Thanks to Per Egil Kummervold for the pointer!)

Other ThinkPad 390E users' web pages

Please let me know if you have a page which could be added here.

Craig Kulesa's page. This is an excellent page -- highly recommended if you want a really comprehensive web page on Linux on the 390E.
Allin Cottrell's page -- also full of good stuff.

Also, please join the linux-thinkpad mailing list and share your experiences with everyone else.

N.B. Unfornately, there are two linux-thinkpad mailing lists. Here's the other one.

Links