Getting your CX to go full screen
According to IBM's page, The 755CX can do the following.
755CX
- 10.4-inch, 65 536 colors, VGA TFT color LCD (640 by 480 resolution)
- 10.4-inch, 65 536 colors, SVGA TFT color LCD (800 by 600 resolution)
What this means in Linux, is that you can use 800x600 at 8bpp color.
This will cause some more ugliness later, with pixelization and such, but it is the price that you will have to pay to have X-Window running on this machine.
The default mode for this TFT display is to have a large border around the image. IBM shipped a tool with the ThinkPads called ps2.com that could set this up full screen.
Since you have to run a dos program in order to get full screen, you will be unable to use lilo to just boot into Linux. You will have to use loadlin to do this.
Below is a sample autoboot.bat file which calls loadlin.
ps2 mode3x on
loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
NOTE: This file only takes care of making your display full screen.
The loadlin command in this example has to be called from the directory where your vmlinuz files resides.
If you do not have the ps2.com program, you can get it and all the original software from IBM's website.
If you have DOS/winX on this machine already, you can just run loadlin from DOS-mode.
Note: A DOS window will not work.
If you are not using DOS/WinX on this machine, you can either boot from a DOS boot floppy forever, or you can make a small (~2MB) partition to hold the files.
If you choose to go the DOS partition way, you can just replace all the mentions of floppies with your boot partition in the example below.
Here are the steps for making the boot image.
Note: You will have to have a working and booting version of linux installed at this point.
- Make a DOS bootdisk. (This should be done before you start)
- Mount the disk in linux.
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
- Copy your working kernel to the disk.
cp /boot/vmlinux /mnt/floppy
- Copy loadlin onto the boot disk
- Create an autoexec.bat file that will call your ps2 and loadlin commands
#autoexec.bat
ps2 mode3x on
loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
- The directory for your boot disk should look like the following.
[root@localhost /root]# ls /mnt2
autoboot.bat command.com loadlin.exe ps2.idp vmlinuz
autoexec.bak ibmbio.com olly.xf8 ps2.msg
autoexec.bat ibmdos.com ps2.exe ps2a.idp
[root@localhost /root]#
- Once you get to this point, you should be able to boot from the floppy.
- (if you are using a DOS boot partition)
You will have to make sure that /etc/lilo.conf knows about it and will boot it.