Oke, that title may be a little over the top, but it is what it pretends to be. And rightfully so since I've wasted, err spend a lot of time figuring out how to get it up and running. But first how this came all about.
Compaq Presario R3000 LCD Screen(Resolution: 1280x800 pixels;Aspect ratio: WXGA, Wide screen )
Gateway NX560XL LCD Screen(Resolution: 1280x800 pixels;Aspect ratio: WXGA, Wide screen )
A little history
The company where I work occasionaly sells old office equipment to its employees for a small amount of money. Sometimes it's tables and chairs, sometimes old lab equipment. You know, tech freaks love that kind of stuff. At the top of the whishlist are old PC's and laptops, which can be put to good use on all kind of home projects. So, on one of these occasions I ended up with a Compaq Armada 4120, including a docking station.
It had Windows 95 installed on it and nothing else. But that was oke with me since I had other plans for it anyway; it was to become my Linux playground. It hardly cost me anything and was in no way needed for my daily computational needs, so I could wreck it without causing a problem. Together with a friend I started out to get things started. First we figured out how to repartition the harddisk, in order to save Win95, add a Linux partition and have some swapspace as well. Unfortunately this Armada came without the CD-ROM craddle, which would have made installing any Linux distribution a lot easier. Either a disk set had to be created or a network install attempted. Of course the latter was a bigger challange so we choose that. A spare PCMCIA Ethernet card was put in the slot, a PCMCIA setup disk created from the intended distribution (we used Redhat 6.1 Cartman at the time) and put in the disk drive. Then we fired her up. Well, as you've probably guessed we loaded Redhat, compiled a custom kernel tailored to the Armada and setup LILO to play around with various settings. Once that kernel was pretty much the way we wanted it, I started exploring the motherload of software and services that were available on the machine. Configuring all this stuff, especially the X server was very educational, so it served its purpose very well.
Of course the Internet proved a valuable source of information on this. These are the pages I used to get most of the stuff working.
LTN184KT01-A01 18.4-inch LCD Screen(Size: 18.4 inches Resolution: 1680*945 pixels )
Sony Vaio VGN AW180FU Series 18.4-inch LCD Screen(Size: 18.4 inches Resolution: 1680*945 pixels )
LG LP173WD1-TLA1 17.3 INCH LCD SCREEN(Size: 17.3 Resolution: 1600*900 pixels )
It lead me to believe that there is a TI ThunderLAN chip in there. So I started with that driver. I first tried it with the 2.2 kernel I have been using until now, which is modular, so I could load the driver on runtime. 'insmod tlan duplex=2' would load the driver and get things going. Well it didn't. After trying several other drivers to no avail I focused my attention to the 2.4.2 kernel sources. Maybe it contained a better driver which may work on this setup after all. After building a few monolithic kernels I still didn't get the result I was hoping for.
Dell Inspiron 9200 LCD Screen(Size: 17.0 inchs;Resolution: 1440x900 pixels )
Dell Inspiron 6000 LCD Screen(Resolution: 1280x800 pixels;Aspect ratio: WXGA, Wide screen )
Dell Inspiron E1501 LCD Screen(Resolution: 1280x800 pixels;Aspect ratio: WXGA, Wide screen )
Time to call in the experts. From the driver sources in the kernel I found a mailing list on sourceforge which is dedicated to the TLAN chipset support on Linux, moderated by the driver maintainer Sam Chessman. I had hoped that someone on the list had seen the problem before and could point me to a rapid solution, but no one did. Instead Sam provided very good step by step guidance through the process of determining the cause of the problem.
One thing that stood out was the fact that the Ethernet chip wasn't to be found on the PCI bus. So how was it hooked up to the system? What I had noted in the Win95 driver was that there is a parallel port setting in there. Curious. Then someone mentioned pocket adapters. They were popular for a few years after which PCMCIA and USB adapters took the market by storm. They were dongle style parallel port adapters which create a Ethernet port. D-link and Xircom were the prominent brands. Together with this conversation this lead me to believe that maybe there is no TLAN chip in there after all. After all, it was only an unconfirmed statement. Now with more questions than answers there remained only one thing to do. To open up the docking station...
Gateway MA7 LCD Screen(Resolution: 1280x800 pixels;Aspect ratio: WXGA, Wide screen )
Gateway NX510S LCD Screen(Resolution: 1280x800 )
LP089WS1-TLA1 LCD Panel(Size: 8.9 inchs;Resolution: 1024*600 pixels)
HP Pavilion ZT3000 15.4 inch Lcd Screen(Size: 15.4 inches Resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
IBM ThinkPad Z60M 15.4 inch Lcd Screen(Size: 15.4 inches Resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
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