New Laptop!
My new laptop is a ThinkPad T42p and it’s mostly up and running now.
If you’re looking for advice about how to install Linux on your Thinkpad, I suggest you start with the IBM pages at http://www.linux-laptop.net/. Everything you find here, I learned from those pages, and from the linux-thinkpad mailing list. I don’t think I have a much to add at this point.
The Good
Getting the T42p up and running was remarkably straightforward considering how little I know about modern x86 architecture machines. I started by booting it up and letting the Windows XP install process grind along. I poked about a bit to see if everything seemed to be working. It did.
Next, I created a System Rescue CD and booted it up. Using qtparted, I blew away the IBM system rescue partition and resized the NTFS partition down to 10GB. It turns out I could have created my own rescue CDs, but since I’d already asked IBM to send me a set, I didn’t bother.
Having created a bit of free space on the disk, I booted with the Debian “Sarge” network install disk, made a few partitions, and got a base system installed. Real sysadmins may question my partitioning choices:
hda1 Boot Primary NTFS [] 10737.38
hda2 Primary Linux ext3 [Root] 16001.56
hda5 Logical Linux ext3 [Home] 4002.33
hda6 Logical Linux ext3 [Mail] 4002.33
hda7 Logical Linux ext3 [Share] 23201.10
hda8 Logical Linux swap 2066.97Modern machines seem to just have a single huge partition, but
I’ve never done it that way and so I’ve stuck with what makes me comfortable.
In particular, I use the nntp backend of
gnus to read mail; that leaves every message
in a separate file, so the Mail partition is setup
with a smaller than usual block size. The large swap partition is to
ensure that I can hibernate the machine.
Anyway, Debian is great. Update
/etc/apt/sources.list, run
apt-get update and
apt-get upgrade and you’ve got an up-to-date
system running. To build a modern kernel, I installed
gcc, binutils, etc.
I built a stock 2.6.8.1 kernel with
William Stein’s .config
file.
At this point, I had a running system. The next problem was getting X Windows up and running. I decided to build X.org’s X11R6/6.8.0. I used apt-get to grab a working X11 install, but I never tried to run the XFree86 server.
There aren’t (yet) any packaged versions of the X.org server,
so I grabbed the sources and built them. This is a delightfully
fast laptop. The X.org build system will apparently only install in
/usr/X11R6, so I renamed a few things and made
a couple of links before running make install.
To get
emacs running again (!), I had to copy the
libXaw3d libraries over from the XFree86 install.
Having grabbed William’s .config file,
I went ahead and grabbed his /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
file too.
Ran like a charm.
The WiFi card in this laptop uses the Atheros chipset, so the madwifi drivers work perfectly.
Patching and rebuilding the kernel with Software Suspend 2 support quickly got me a “hibernate” function working. Suspending to RAM was already working with ACPI.
Installing drivers for the Conexant HSF modem even got that working. I’m using the free drivers, but really, I don’t use dialup anymore so I’ll probably never bother to buy a commercial license.
In short: from unpacking the boxes to a working Linux box in a few short hours, not counting the time it took to migrate all my data across. Not too shabby.
The Bad
Murphy is ever vigilant. Nothing I was worried about turned out to be difficult to setup at all. Something I didn’t give any thought to at all, the ability to display on the LCD panel and an external monitor at the same time, turns out to be…hard. Hard in this context being roughly synonymous with “impossible”. As someone who gives presentations with fair regularity, this is seriously bad. I’m also hoping it’s something that can be fixed fairly quickly. It seems to be related to IBM ACPI support. Fingers crossed.
[Update 21 Sep 2004: turns out there’s a BIOS setting to toggle between DRI (some sort of digital output for external LCD displays) and VGA (for traditional CRTs). It’s set to DRI by default and setting it to VGA fixes the problem. Whew!]
The Ugly
There’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t got working yet. Not because I expect it to be hard, but because I haven’t had time to try yet: irDA, Bluetooth, CD/DVD burning, turning off the touchpad. I’ll report more when I know more.
For now, I’m very happy with my Thinkpad.
Comments
On partitioning and filesystems with lots of little files... try reiserfs and LVM. You'll be glad you did. I'd include links if you allowed me to. :-P
I haven't gone as far as putting my root filesystem on LVM, but all my other partitions are.
Need some space in /var? it's as easy as
No rebooting or even unmounting required.
I have included your report into the TuxMobil Linux Laptops and Notebook Survey (http://tuxmobil.org/ibm.html). -- Werner
I just got a T42p myself, after living with a T30 for a couple of years. Turning off the touchpad on IBM thinkpad T3x/4x is as simple as toggling a BIOS option. Just hit F1 during the POST screen and you'll find it. Bluetooth works under bluez-utils. CD burning works under k3b. I haven't tried the DVD burner yet.
Norm, I found out today that I have a new T42p work machine on the way, as a replacement for my current company-issues notebook.
After I get it, I think I may want some more details about the part where you "renamed a few things and made a couple of links" before you ran "make install" to build your X.org server.
Probably you've figured out by now that you can turn off the touchpad via BIOS.
I was wondering something if you know. I have a sony vaio laptop. I just rebooted microsoft windows xp onto it after my windows program was corrupted. Now i have no sound to my windows media player. So i cant play any movies or music. How do i get the sound back on my laptop?