Today at the clinic, we attempted to convert a second Thinkpad T60 to QXGA. Didn't work out as expected.
As you may recall, the screen EDID ROM needs to be reprogrammed so the Thinkpad BIOS will talk to it. For the first screen, I used the WinXP that the laptop came with, downloaded Powerstrip and registered it for $30, then jumped through more hoops to get the special 16 bit hex password needed to /write/ to the screen. It turns out that the software only works with the same identical hardware - I would have to buy another copy of Powerstrip for each screen, and jump through more hoops. I can try moving the new screen to the first T60, but I would rather not risk breaking it. We next looked at using i2c-tools. However, the main scanning tool, i2cdetect, which promiscuously looks for all the I2C addressable components, contains this warning message for one of the options: - This is known to corrupt the Atmel AT24RF08 EEPROM found - on many IBM Thinkpad laptops. Yikes! We decided caution was the better part of valor, and did not try. But ... It occured to me this evening that the X driver looks at the EDID ROM as well. Sure enough, at "address 0xa0" on the I2C bus, the open source version of the ATI driver locates the panel by name, and produces the bytes of the EDID ROM. I don't know much about I2C, but I suspect that writing the ROM is not that much different than reading it ( Galen, correct me if I am wrong ). With the address, we don't need to look at the whole machine promiscuously, just the display ROM. So, we may be able to look at the code for the open source version of the ATI driver, and for the I2C-tools, and build a small program that safely programs the display without risking bricking the laptop. It would be extra cool if we could put said program on a CD ( Linux or FreeDOS ) that does some testing then reprograms the EDID automagically. Comments? Anybody want to help with some code? Keiith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
