[9fans] Brazil (sorry)

[9fans] Brazil (sorry)

[forsyth]

>>I wouldn't ask but I am about to invest in a Laptop and would love to run
>>Plan9 on it so it makes sense to but a supported machine rather than
>>do a heafty porting exercise all for the want of a bit of advice.

it's fine on my thinkpad 600 because the firmware looks after
the power management and suspend business well enough to be quite
usable without my having to wade through the APM and ACPI specs.
the thinkpad has got a three-button pointing device built-in.
(i usually attach a ps2 mouse and the thinkpad merges the data streams
with the trackpoint data.)  Plan9 uses 1024x768x8 on the TFT screen.
the internal modem is not usable.  the crystal sound system should be
usable but i haven't tried it yet.

[9fans] Brazil (sorry)

[jmk]

[I replied to Steve via mail, I'm repeating and expanding on part of it here]

The only laptops supported by Brazil which I haven'tmade available
yet are the IBM Thinkpad 560E, NEC Versa SX and the NEC Versa 6030.
The first two use Trident Cyber938x chipa and the other the C&T 65550.
The 560E and 6030 are obsolete.

Laptops using the NeoMagic chips are very common, but it's not easy to get
info from NeoMagic on how to programme them. There is some info around which
I know has been used to get the display working with Plan 9 on an IBM
Thinkpad 600, but Brazil wants to use a hardware cursor and there's no info
on how to do that (Plan 9 can use a software cursor). I'm not sure how this
will pan out for Brazil, XFree86 has NeoMagic support and we could try to
work it out from that.

There are a few laptops using the ATI Rage LT chip, which could probably be
made to work as Plan 9/Brazil both support the Rage chips. There are still
some using the Trident and C&T chips mentioned above but I think C&T is now
pretty much out of the business (bought by someone? Intel?). There's also
an S3 mobile chip which is very similar to one of the other S3 chips supported.

Another thing to think about is PCMCIA/Cardbus. Some manufacturers use their
own PCMCIA chipsets which are incompatible with the Intel 82365 (e.g. some
Toshiba). There's currently no Cardbus support (the Versa SX mentioned above
isn't one I can play with easily) but there's usually no problem using an
old PCMCIA card in a Cardbus slot.

We really haven't done much with laptops for a while. The last time we bought
one (Versa SX) the contraints were it had to be 5lbs or less, manage 1024x768
on the display and work with the drivers we had. That left a field of one.

--jim

[9fans] Brazil (sorry)

[forsyth]

>>I am looking at machines with "Neomagic chipsets" though I have not been able to
>>get any more info (does not bode well for porting).

i have aux/vga and kernel modules (for Plan 9) that work
for the neomagic chipset in my thinkpad 600-410.
i do not know whether it would work elsewhere.
it's really just a transliteration of the fairly mysterious code
in the xfree86 implementation; i don't know what most of the numbers mean.
i have heard that as usual there is precious little need for neomagic to
be secretive.  it's the usual svga arrangement.
i'm always a little worried having to work with magic numbers
when dealing with LCD panels, since it's costly to fry them.

[9fans] Brazil (sorry)

[Steve]

Hi,

Sorry to do this to you, its the kind of think I hate, but...

Any chance you could give me some idea of new driver support for
Brazil (Plan9 Release 4 ?), particularly graphics devices.

I wouldn't ask but I am about to invest in a Laptop and would love to run
Plan9 on it so it makes sense to but a supported machine rather than
do a heafty porting exercise all for the want of a bit of advice.

I understand you have made no comitement to release Brazil but if you where
to
what would you advise?

I am looking at machines with "Neomagic chipsets" though I have not been
able to
get any more info (does not bode well for porting).

I am writing to you direct so as not to encourage other querys.

Thanks for any help.

-Steve


Please reply to: steve@savan.demon.co.uk