Return of my A30

[Pokrzept]

I received the display, but it is not new as the seller (bumblesale on ebay) claimed, there is yellowing around the edges of the screen and it has obviously been mounted in a laptop before.

I would've been incredibly surprised had you actually received a NOS panel, it's pretty much an equivalent of an unicorn nowadays...

If the screen is any good, ask for a partial refund and keep it. At least that's what I would do.

Good luck.

Apparently my wife is different than other girls, I always thought that they love unicorns

[Adda]

CrunchBang has been installed on the A30 again, and configured using what I have learned from the X20.

The A30 supports compositing, it should be disabled, not that it makes much of a difference.
16-bit color mode helps, but still the X20 is faster, even if they are run at the same rez.
When I reboot the A30, the screen is black until the video drivers is loaded.
I think the Radeon driver simply doesn't like the M6-LY at all, it's slow, and causes that strange reboot behavior.

Can it really be true, that the Mach64 based 4MB Rage Mobility M, the first mobile video device made by ATi, outperforms the mighty 16MB Radeon M6-LY on Linux????

[Adda]

Ok I did something, donno what but 2D is faster on the A30 now.

(got the X20 down to 55MB ram on fresh boot as well).

[Adda]

Well it seems the old A30 is up and running, faster then XP for web use.

Now I have to try and make flash work, without SSE2.

Edit: that will have to be some other time, it can be done though, through pipelight.

[Adda]

Picture warning!

Here is a pic of my A30, the cable going in to the USB 2.0 card comes from one of the USB ports on the A30, it insures that the PCMCIA card can power any USB device.

http://cdn.head-fi.org/3/3c/3c42ad00_AUT_0808.jpeg

So far, it uses 62MB of ram on a fresh boot.

Thanks to everyone involved!

[Adda]

AHA, I figured it out, what I have to do to get fast 2D is... wait for it... wait.... REBOOT

On a cold boot, 2D is slow, on a reboot it's fast, explain that...

[Adda]

One last thing, I'll just repost the picture of my super advanced A30 GPU cooling mod.
A piece of aluminum has been wedged between the cooler and GPU, it makes the bottom of the A30 MUCH cooler.

http://cdn.head-fi.org/d/db/db31d436_AUT_7702.jpeg

[Adda]

Disabling KMS makes the M6-LY very happy, no need to reboot for good 2D performance.

[Pokrzept]

Do we have ANY Moderator on this forum ?!

[ajkula66]

Do we have ANY Moderator on this forum ?!

I'm not a Mod, but why would you ask?

[Adda]

I'm just posting my progress so that those who are interested have something to read, and so that someone is in the same boat can get a few pointers, no Mod needed?

[RealBlackStuff]

MOD post: It is not unusual (and would be highly appreciated) to edit your own (last) post if nobody has answered in the thread, rather than keep on a monologue...

[Adda]

^
I have done that a lot in the past, will remember to do that more in the future.

Anyway bumblesale have given me a fair partial refund, and have been very reasonable to deal with.
The problem was that the people they bought the UXGA panel from, had not been honest about the condition of the item, and bumblesale has no way of testing such old panels.

Edit: I tried using minitube, in CrunchBang, but always get a "Segmentation Fault" error at startup, so I looked around for an alternative and found SMTube.
SMTube does what minitube does, except you can use your media player of choice for playback, I use VLC.
If you are using 16 bit color mode, you have to use X11 video output to get a picture.

[Adda]

I only have one problem left I can't seem to solve, when KMS is enabled, 3D is working, that's probably the best way to put it, for some reason Vsync is on, even though I disabled it using driconf.
But with KMS enabled 2D is slow, so I disable it, happy world right? no, 3D SLOW with KMS disabled and I have no idea why, everything indicates that I have direct rendring.

But the thing is, if I run glxgears, I get ~10fps, if I mess with my config so that direct rendering is disabled, I still get ~10fps, it makes no difference what so ever.

Glxgears should show hundreds of fps.

Edit: Using the VESA driver, glxgears shows exactly the same fps as the radeon driver, scrolling in firefox is slower though.

Edit2: ah here is the problem, "OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on softpipe".
Now to find out how to fix that...

Edit3: it seems I have encountered a bug!
https://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2013/05/msg00062.html

Yikes, I just realized, SOFTWARE RAID!! I have an Ultrabay 2000 HDD adapter!

Edit4: well that ruined my install, and the CrunchBang installer doesn't work when two HDD's are in the A30, and then there is the 3D problem too.
Since I have to reinstall it anyway, I'll try Linux Mint xfce, the A30 is fast enough.
Making Linux distros consume little ram is my specialty, it's just a matter of compatibility and if the GUI is fast.
I want software raid now, that is how it's going to be!

Edit5: hmm two specs and a hair have already made their way in to my IPS screen...

Edit6: aww hell no, I have spent all day trying to get software raid to work, and I finally did, but then Linux mint just refuses to install, the installer just closes at some point...

Edit7: Linux mint has become the most bloated piece of #¤!{ I have seen for a long time.

Edit8: Good thing I had the CrunchBag install in the X20, it has been adapted to the A30 (again) and will be cloned to a bunch of disks for other Thinkpads once I get around to it.

Edit9: I made a clone of my CrunchBang install for my X20, had to purge and reinstall the intel microcode package.
I also made flash work by using an older version that doesn't require SSE2.

[Adda]

Alright, I finally finished my A30, still running CrunchBang, but now with good plastics kindly supplied by ajkula66 and a Zheino Classic A 32GB SSD, it's blazing fast, what more could I possibly want?

A picture to go with it:
http://cdn.head-fi.org/d/d7/d7564ce0_AUT_1302.jpeg

Edit: by the way, it made it play some 720p videos, I have to reduce the resolution to 640x480 though, at 16 bit color, and the video has to be quite compressed, high quality encoding won't work.
Xrandr can change the resolution with simple commands, you can add those to the GUI menu for easy switching.