T600

Introduction

I bought the IBM T600 Laptop in the ealy 2000s during my media systems studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. It was one of my first expensive buys using ebay. Since the seller was in NYC, I had to do an expensive wire transfer from my local bank. They told me there that they cannot do anything if the seller wont ship the item. It was not possible to get the money back in any case. It was the time before paypal or anything similar.

Nethertheless the laptop was delivered after some weeks in good condition, and it remains working until now.

t600
Thinkpad 600

The specs are a bit dated of course:

I like the keyboard very much, the case is very tough and its easily repairable since the hardware maintenance manual is available from IBM (or Lenovo now).

I repaired the backlight once, replacing the CCFL lamp. Before it was getting darker and darker and finally failed on me.

The batteries failed quite often, I think I used 3 of them. They are long dead. Maybe I will build a custom one at some time.

Currently it runs archlinux32 and is still usable for command line activities ;-).

Floppy

The floppy disk does not work out of the box, add this to grub cmdline:

floppy.floppy='1,4,cmos'

see also this kernel documentation about the floppy disk module.

mwave support

The mwave dsp is used on the T600 for modem and sound functionalities.

1. install mwave package, and make the corrections mentioned above in step 2.
2. in /etc/modutils.d/mwave change last line to: 
options mwave 
    mwave_3780i_io=0x130 
    mwave_3780i_irq=10 
    mwave_uart_io=0x2f8
    mwave_uart_irq=3
3. do dpkg-reconfigure irda-utils and disable irda
4. uncomment line 37 in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts: 
    exclude irq 3
5. should work now
6. no irda support is the only drawback, maybe I get this working soon

sound support

use this script /etc/init.d/soundThinkpad600

#!/bin/sh
echo -n "Load Thinkpad sound modules: "
/sbin/modprobe snd-cs4236 index=0 port=0x530 cport=0x538 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0 isapnp=0 
echo "done" 
echo -n "Set volume: " 
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset "Master Digital",0 90%,90% unmute 
/usr/bin/amixer -q -c 0 sset "PCM",0 90%,90%
unmute echo "done"

Now don't forget to chmod +x the file and:

ln -s /etc/init.d/soundThinkpad600 /etc/rc2.d/S99soundThinkpad600