[9fans] Brazil (sorry)

[jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com]

[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