The ThinkPad 755C arrives! After digging it out of the styrofoam and getting rid of the bubble wrap, it boots without any trouble, albeit into Windows 95. My Debian CD-ROM has not arrived yet, so I resort to the set of floppies I downloaded from the net the other evening.
Installation begins. On the first try, the installation program is unable to mount the rescue disk, despite being able to boot from it. Rebooting and entering linux floppy=thinkpad at the boot: prompt fixes this. When on the device driver disk, installed the following modules: vfat, ps2mouse, ppp, and bsd_comp.
First boot is successful, although mounting the floppy fails. This problem is fixed by placing the lines compact and append="floppy=thinkpad" in /etc/lilo.conf. Both lines are needed for the floppy to be properly mounted.
Meanwhile, with my desktop computer up, downloaded a whole gaggle of .deb packages from a mirror, carefully noting all of the dependencies. I arranged them in the same directory structure as the mirror (e.g. debian/main/binary-i386/x11/) and tarred them to a multidisk archive (tar cvMf /dev/fd0 debian).
Installed a bunch of packages with dselect. Realized that I didn't get cpp (C pre-processor), which gcc and friends depend on, as well as xbase (?). Deferred until tomorrow.
Got cpp, XFree86 now up and running after tweaking the XF86Config file manually to allow the monitor to have the proper refresh rate for 640x480, 8bpp resolution.
Began using icewm as primary window manager over olwvm.
Re-compiled kernel (using 2.0.36 sources) with APM drivers. Also downloaded the PCMCIA driver sources, and compiled them.
First attempt at using PPP, using a borrowed PC card modem. At first, it was impossible to reach the outside world unless I used a non-WizardNet DNS server. There were also a lot of "CCP: Timeout sending config requests" in the system long. After about two hours of frustration, the problem seemed to correct itself. (This was probably a result of the ice storm which hit the Washington area that day -- there was a note about it from the support staff the following Monday.)
Problems with allocating colors on the 8-bit display were becoming apparent. On occasion, xpat2 refused to run because of too many allocated colors in the colormap. First tried limiting xfishtank to 24, then 16, colors, did not help the situation. Then tried going back to olwm, which solved, or at least alleviated, the problem.
Downloaded the Blackbox sources, compiled, installed. This window manager is able to use dithering to conserve colormap space, a major plus. It was also about as fast as icewm, and small to boot. Very impressive Also tried WindowMaker, which was smaller and slower, but was slightly more visually appealing.
Blackbox made the new default window manager. Had fun configuring the menus and default behavior. Lack of ability to auto-hide the toolbar somewhat annoying, but livable.
My own PC Card modem arrives, a Megahertz XJ2144. It's only a 14.4, which means that lynx should be the preferred browser from now on.
Set up fetchmail to get my IMAP inbox. For now, using pine to read and to "hand-synchronize" the online inbox. Hopefully they'll get on the ball and finish disconnected mode support before I find time to write a fetchmail-like utility to synchronize multiple IMAP mailboxes myself.
Discovered the bbtools. Found bbmail to be of use.
Noticed the machine was not suspending (and becoming unstable) when the lid was closed, and not responding to Fn-F4 requests from the keyboard. Tried recompiling the kernel with the "Ignore Multiple Suspend" option (under APM support). Worked on the X-less 755C at work. However, on this machine the computer would beep to indicated that the suspend attempt failed. Looked at the power configuration using IBM's DOS-mode PS2 utility (from a bootable DOS disk), and both machines are configured the same way. I'm not sure why this is happening.
Discovered the lovely world of WindowMaker Dock Apps, went back to using WindowMaker, performance be damned!
Had a problem with sendmail hanging. The official message was "can't find my fully qualified domain name, sleeping for retry." Very annoying. Was fixed by adding the the name of my ISP to my host's name in /etc/hosts.
The machine is more or less stable now. However, when trying to update my installation of WindowMaker, I noticed that I hadn't installed the patch utility. D'oh!
After getting a faster modem (through marriage), I used dselect with an FTP access method to upgrade to Debian version 2.1 (slink). There was some unpleasantness (LILO got as far as LI when I tried to boot), but with a rescue disk and a lilo reinstall had everything back to normal.