Getting X to work on the 365XD

I have reinstalled Linux on my 365XD IBM Thinkpad Laptop. The install went smoothly, and I only had a couple of problems this time.

The first problem was getting IBM's wonky BIOS to see LILO. It would give a "Can not boot from hard disk" error, which, in the ThinkPad tradition, was an obscure looking "I9990302"-type message. I created a Linux boot disk and booted in to Linux. Once in Linux, I re-ran LILO. No results, same error message. Booting in to Linux again, I placed LILO on the Master boot record (/dev/hda) in addition to having it already installed on the first partition (/dev/hda1). Doing this got LILO to work.

As covered in my last article on the 365XD, I only had one primary partition, and an extended partition. This time, I made a number of partitions on the extended partition. This allowed me to have some parts of the filesystem be mounted "fast and unsafe", and other parts be mounted "slow and safe". It also allowed me to make /home small enough to fit on to a single ZIP disks, making backups more convenient.

The second problem I ran in to was getting X to function. After some trial and error and troubleshooting, I learned that versions of XFree86 newer than XFree86-3.2 will not function with my IBM Thinkpad 365XD. You may upgrade the libraries to the 3.3.1 libraries if you are concerned about security, but the rest of the XFree86 package needs to be the version 3.2 package. You may download a copy of XFree86 3.2 here.

XFree86-3.2 is the version of XFree included with Caldera OpenLinux and with the original RedHat-4.2.