Thinkpads Forum

Long story short, got my uncle's old IBM Thinkpad 560E. Installed DSL, and for some reason or another everything is running in 640x400. As soon as it gets past POSTing, everything is in this small window in the middle of the screen--not nearly filling up the entire monitor.

The console is in this little box, not my xwindows setup or anything, just the console, and I can't figure out why the hell it's doing this. I ran the BIOS tests, specifically for the monitor, and it showed me all these pretty graphs of it doing 256 million colors or whatever in 800x600 (glorious full screen) so I know it can do it just fine. But furthermore, whenever I try to set xwindows to run in anything other than 640x400 in 4bit color it spazzes out. Except for 800x400 in 4 bit color, then the screen just blanks while it seems to be loading whatever the hell it's loading.

This little window thing isn't relegated to DSL, either. When I was installing it, I had to boot from a different boot disk, and it was still running in this small space in the center of the screen.

I'm currently trying to find a BIOS update, since websites say that there was an update released in 2000, and the laptop is reporting its date as 97', but this is the last thing I can think of... and I’m getting the royal run-about.

Any ideas as to why this laptop is tormenting me so?

You will need to try to download the correct display/video driver for this model laptop.

Here is the link:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-60522

I updated the BIOS (still have the problem) but it seems that the video drivers are specificaly for Windows/DOS.

Is there anyway I could have turned off "Screen Expansion"? The 560E dosn't have the Fn+F8 that the 560z seems to have, so is there another way?

If you scroll down in the link that I gave you, there is a link for Windows 95/98, as well.

What OS are you running?

Sorry, I should have specified further, [censored] Small Linux. It's a Knopix variant. But the problem is that in the console itself, not windows, is in a smallish window. For example, if I had just installed dos, the dos console would run in this small window.

Gotcha!

Not sure about your distro, but with Red Hat, you have to tell it that your display is a 1024x768 or 800x600 LCD display (whichever yours is), not a standard display.

It took me a while to figure that out the first time that I installed linux on a 600E.