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Letters, Addenda, Errata

Translation: Christian Hennecke

Hi!
Since I'm using a T23 with eCS I'm interested in the author's comments concerning the winmodem the T30 is equipped with. My T23 comes with a Lucent Winmodem as well (AFAIK all TP machines T20 and above come with that chipset), and I was able to successfully use it with some sort of old beta driver from IBM which can be downloaded from http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/system/drivers/modem/lucent.exe offering a connection speed of 33 kbps (well, I wouldn't really expect anything better from such a device anyway).

On the other hand I was unable to use a PCMCIA modem without errors (eg. resource conflicts). Since I intend to connect using LAN Distance (which until now seems to be impossible with that winmodem) I'd really like to operate a PCMCIA modem in my TP. How did the author achieve that? Did he possibly deactivate the builtin modem?

Regards,

Philhard Ackermann

Yes, the Lucent AMR modem is completely different -- still a Winmodem, but newer chipset.

Getting the PCMCIA modem working wasn't particularly challenging. Just the normal stuff with the PC Card Director's Auto Configurator Utility, to get the modem assigned to COM2 (or COM3) and a free interrupt/IO port combination. Mine is at port 2F8, interrupt 3 (COM2), with the infrared disabled.

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Timothy F. Sipples

Thanks for the great article on the Thinkpad T30 in the January newsletter Voice. I unfortunately had to learn through trial and error many of the useful tips when I installed eComStation on my T30 last month. Here are a few comments that you might want to pass along to your readers:

1. I was able to dual boot with Windows 98, but only by putting Windows and OS2 in 2GB bootable partitions in the first part of the drive. Windows cannot see any extended logical drives beyond cylinder 1024 (7.5GB), or see any extended logical drives bigger than 2GB in the first 1024 cylinders, although neither is a problem using eComStation's LVM. So only in OS2 do you have full use of the disk under dual boot.

2. The public version of the thinkpad pcmcia socket driver IBM2SS14.SYS did not work for the TI 1520 chip in my T30. However, Dani Engert's version of the socket driver, ss2ticb.sys, described in your October newsletter, does work, so this is an option for those without the software choice subscription.

3. I cannot get USB boot to work. Once booted, USB does work with the standard drivers. However, the machine appears to have three USB controllers, so to get multiple USB devices to work, you need to load the base driver three times; e, g.,

BASEDEV=USBUHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBUHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBUHCD.SYS

That's it. Thanks again for the useful article.

Matt Berman

Hello Timothy,

Thanks for your article about OS/2 on a T30. You mentioned the problem with Warp4 install. There's no need to create the boot diskettes for Warp4 because I have the solution: a bootable W4 Install-CD. You can create this CD with little effort: download the package, copy the W4-CD to hdd then update and burn. Afterwards you have an updated Warp4-CD which boots off the CD and gives a flawless install... Check out: http://www.os2usr.org/w4bootcd.html

Well you have a P4 and 512MB Ram do you need the P4 fix for this? Could you test it with my package?
Thanks!

Mike

Mike:

You're absolutely right. A bootable Warp 4 CD would fit the bill quite well. I ended up using my trusty Micro-Solutions Backpack parallel port CD-ROM drive and the standard diskette drive in the Ultrabay, and that worked, too.

The "Pentium 4 bug" was apparently solved, in my case, with updated boot diskettes (available from IBM's ThinkPad driver web site). After installation, the system wouldn't boot until I put an updated kernel on. (I don't think COPYFROMFLOPPY includes the kernel and loader, so you have to replace OS2KRNL and OS2LDR with newer ones right after the first phase of installation.) So as long as your boot CD contains a relatively recent kernel, it should be fine. You might want to check those boot diskettes from IBM to see if you have those versions of the critical files, or newer. If you're creating your Warp 4 boot CD from FixPack 16 and Device Driver Pak 3 files, that should work fine, too.

I certainly have access to Warp 4.52, eComStation, etc. But I thought it would be fun to try the classic Warp 4, and, with only a little extra effort, it works just fine.

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Timothy F. Sipples

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