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Date:      Mon, 7 Oct 1996 13:34:16 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Chris Timmons <skynyrd@opus.cts.cwu.edu>
To:        freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org
Subject:   Versa 6030X, 3c589c adventures
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.95.961007125731.27986A-100000@opus.cts.cwu.edu>

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Greetings,

My thanks to Nate Williams, Tatsumi Hosokowa, the nomads group, bootasia,
and the freebsd cast of k's for all of their efforts to make freebsd
viable on notebook computers.

I've been working with a brand new NEC 6030X (and a 3com 3c589c ethernet
adapter) and have had a bit of an adventure that might be interesting to
others on this list.  

HW 

The machine has a P133, 1.4G IDE disk, 16MB RAM, 1024x768 XGA color and a
versa-bay which can accept a floppy, cd, hd or battery.  Also there is a
built-in 28.8 fax modem which appears on cuaa1 (COM2).  PhoenixNoteBIOS
4.0 is present on the machine. 

DISK PARTITIONING THRASH

I chose W95 (vs wfw 311) as my factory OS.  Unfortunately, if there is an
easy way to repartition the disk so to leave room for freebsd, I missed
it.  NEC supplies a bootable CD from which you can reinstall w95, but it
is non-interactive and takes the entire disk each time.  I wound up going
into BIOS and reducing the # of cylinders for the disk to the number that
I wanted for w95.  I was able to install from the NEC restore CD, restore
the bios geometry, boot w95 from floppy and 'sys c:'.  This worked, and I
was able to then do the kind of normal partitioning that one does in the
freebsd installation procedure.  NEC phone support disavows any
repartitioning and multiple os environments, be they freebsd or otherwise. 

ETHERNET THRASH

I have had mixed success with the 3c589c.  Per Nate Williams' advice in
the archives, I attempted to make 3com's setup programs run from DOS to
tell me the card's IRQ, IO port address, etc.  I could not find any
combination of 'real' dos floppy or W95 'dos mode' environments to make
these programs run.  Usually the failure is that 'no 3com adapters located
on this system.' Ditto on a colleague's toshiba 486 laptop.  However, w95
finds the card and drives it without any problem.  My research indicates I
need 'card services' for DOS, but it doesn't appear that they come with
the laptop.  3com says that you can still run diagnostics without 'card
services' but I couldn't get past the 'can't find adapter' problems, in
either slot.

I did read the settings that w95 reported and fed them into a /kernel -c
boot from the 2.2-960801-SNAP boot floppy after disabling ze0.  It seems
to find zp0 but then I do not see that interface in the menu for network
interfaces later on in the install.  I am guessing that the settings I see
in w95 are incomplete or only in effect when w95 has the card. 

Using the bootasia floppy, I was able to get an installation going using
the ep0 driver, but after several minutes, barely into the bindist (after
seeing local transfer rates of 1.6KB max!) everything hangs.  Watching
with tcpdump, the laptop fails to ack a data packet and its all over.
Further retries from the remote ftpd go un-acked.  I can however ^C out of
the install and do see the FTP ABORT message on the debug console.

Any suggestions for a different card that might work better?  The 389c has
part number 16-0020-00 REV B.

NEXT

I think I am probably going to do a ppp installation of 2.1.5-R and see if
Xfree86-3.1.2G will work with the "Chips & Technologies 65550 PCI" adapter
that W95 reports.  Ultimately I will try to run -current and provide some
help (if only testing) with the many interesting facets of mobile support
that I see people working on. 

Thanks again for making this possible!

-Chris Timmons
 Central Washington University




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