I bought my IBM A21p laptop early in 2001 to replace my ageing KTX 1000 laptop. All in all this was pretty straightforward, with just a few little problems getting things going:
The IBM A21 comes in several flavours. The particular laptop I bought was a PIII 850 with 512MB of RAM, 32GB hard drive and a 15" TFT screen (1600x1200 pixels by 24-bit colour).
I use Debian GNU/Linux almost exclusively. I have only tried Debian on the laptop, but I have installed Slackware, RedHat, SUSE, Caldera and other distributions on other hardware. We use Debian for our servers in the office, and for clients. This means that if you have a problem with RedHat or something I may be unable to help. On the other hand the only real differences between distributions of Linux are the setup programs, and the locations of files: the actual programs are pretty much the same.
Have a read of my old essay on Linux distributions if you want to get my full views of the differences between them.
Linux 2.2 and later has kernel support for various graphics modes for console use. Supposedly this includes support for the
Rage 128 chipset, but perhaps not for the Rage Mobility. I have had no luck building a kernel which supports the Rage 128, but
the VESA support seems to work just fine. If I add a:
vga=0x307 # 1280x1024 x 256
into my lilo.conf I get a nice 1280x1024 graphics mode console with about 60 lines and 120 columns of text.
I have installed XFree86 4 from the Debian packages (currently 4.0.2-13) and everything is working fine. The display is excellent. I haven't got any DVD's to play, but there are some instructions on how to get DVD's going on an IBM Thinkpad A21m, which look interesting. One thing that is mentioned there is a particular driver for the ATI Rage Mobility M3, which also works well.
This works fine with kernels from 2.2.19 on. For 2.2.18 the ALSA support works well also. The only issues I seem to have with this are in suspending the laptop, which I have overcome by switching to a 2.4.4 kernel.
When I originally bought this laptop it came with a 3com Mini-PCI Ethernet plus Modem. Although the ethernet works fine, the modem is a WinModem with a proprietary 3com DSP and is unlikely to ever see Linux support.
Since I couldn't get linux support from 3com, I bought a replacement mini-PCI from IBM, and this one uses the Lucent DSP, for which Linux support is now quite mature. See linmodems.org for more information and download. The ltmodem package can easily be built as a Debian package for installation on Debian systems, which is a bonus.
In either case, the ethernet works well with Linux. The 3com is a 'Hurricane' and uses the 3c59x driver. The IBM card has an Intel Etherexpress Pro/100 chip (8255x) and works well with the standard eepro100 module, or with the separately downloadable e100 module (there is a Debian package for this).
Works well. The only issue seems to be the handling of the sound card. On re-start I lose one, or both, channels using the 2.2.x kernels, and have to customise the APM events to stop and start alsa. With the 2.4.4 kernel I have no problems with sound suspending / restarting, even while playing music with XMMS resume will just resume right in the middle of a track.
I only rarely shut the computer down, suspending it as I move from location to location, and using my whereami package to perform appropriate reconfiguration.
This 2.2.20 linux kernel .config works well for me for 2.2.20.
This 2.4.4 linux kernel .config is what I currently use. Unfortunately Nokia only provides closed source drivers for the C110 WLAN card, so I cannot use a more recent kernel :-(
updated: 12 January 2002