By Soren Harward: sth (at) freeshell (dot) org. Please note that this document assumes that you already know how to install Gentoo and are comfortable with intermediate-difficulty Linux system administration tasks like patching and recompiling the kernel or editing xorg.conf by hand. It's a quick reference for someone who's got a good idea of what he or she is doing but doesn't want to duplicate my effort. It's not a tutorial for someone who's entering unfamiliar territory. You are welcome to email me if you have comments or suggestions or corrections, and I'll take questions as long as you remember that the chance of me answering it is directly proportional to how well you paid attention to the rest of this paragraph.
A wealth of more detailed information about running Linux in Thinkpads is available at ThinkWiki.
Last updated 5 Sep 2006.
| Device | Status | Driver | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Pentium M 760 | All Good | Kernel option “Pentium M” |
| USB | USB 2.0 Controller | All Good | Kernel drivers “EHCI” and “UHCI” |
| Power Management | ACPI | Mostly Working | Kernel driver “ACPI” with all features, including “IBM Extras” |
| CPU Throttling | All Good | Kernel driver “Intel Enhanced Speedstep” | |
| Hibernation | All Good | Ebuild
sys-power/hibernate-script Ebuild sys-apps/suspend2-userui Ebuild sys-apps/vbetool |
|
| Mass Storage | Hard Drive | All Good | Kernel drivers “SCSI disk” and
“Intel PIIX/ICH” (under “low-level
drivers/SATA”) Ebuild sys-apps/sdparm |
| DVDRW / CDRW | All Good | Kernel driver ”SCSI CDROM” | |
| HDAPS | All Good | Kernel patches Ebuild app-laptop/hdapsd |
|
| Video | ATI Mobility X300 | Sorta | Kernel driver “VESA framebuffer” Ebuild media-video/ati-drivers |
| Display | Built-in LCD (14") | All Good | N/A | Analog VGA out | Mostly Working | N/A | S-Video out | All Good | N/A |
| Pointing Devices | Touchpad | All Good | Kernel driver “PS/2 Mouse” and “Event
Interface” Ebuild x11-misc/synaptics |
| Pointing Stick | All Good | Same as above | |
| Communications | Ethernet | All Good | Kernel driver “Broadcom Tigon3” |
| Wireless | All Good | Ebuild net-wireless/ipw2200 | |
| Modem | Not Working | Kernel (ALSA) driver “MC97 Modem” Ebuild net-dialup/slmodem |
|
| Bluetooth | All Good | Kernel driver “HCI USB Driver” | |
| IRDA | Untested | ||
| Audio | Intel ICH6 | All Good | Kernel (ALSA) driver “Intel AC97” |
| PCMCIA | Cardbus adapter | All Good | Kernel driver “Cardbus yenta-compatible” and “16-bit PCMCIA” (if needed) |
Adjusting the LCD brightness through software doesn't work. The buttons on the keyboard do work, though. acpid also doesn't pick up events from the power button for some odd reason.
Make sure you disable all ATA/ATAPI device support. Even though the drives themselves are PATA, they are connected through a SATA interface, and libata recognizes them as SATA drives.
Follow the tutorial at ThinkWiki.
You must use vbetool with the hibernate script to suspend while running X.
If you want to be able to hibernate the laptop while running X, you have to disable DRI in your xorg.conf. The laptop will suspend with DRI enabled, but completely locks up on resume.
The button <Fn+F7> in text mode just switches between built-in and external displays, but won't cycle to where it displays to both. You can, however, use /proc/acpi/ibm/video to get around this.
Under X, the ATI driver will clone the display to the output. My external LCD at first refused to sync to the signal because the rate was too low. I set “IgnoreEDID” option to “on”— and put my LCD's HSync and VRefresh values in “HSync2” and “VRefresh2” and then it worked fine. I have not yet tried Xinerama and spanning the desktop across the internal and external monitors.
S-Video works only if you're already plugged into the projector/TV when you power on the laptop.
You need two separate “InputDevice” entries in
xorg.conf to get these to work together. /dev/input/mouse0
is the touchpad, which uses the synaptics driver, and
/dev/input/mouse1 is the pointing stick, which can use the regular
mouse driver. If you also want to be able to use a USB mouse, then
add yet another “InputDevice” section using
/dev/input/mouse2. The USB mouse must be plugged in when you start X
for it to work.
The “MC97 Modem” driver in the kernel's ALSA subsystem
detects the modem, and running slmodemd -c=USA -d=1 -g=dialout -a
modem:1 will allow me to send commands to the modem using minicom, but
the modem doesn't detect a dial tone and won't dial any numbers. I never
use the modem anyway, so I don't feel like it's worth my time to get it
working. The volume up/down and mute buttons on the keyboard appear to control a
hardware mixer entirely independent of the sound card (and thus ALSA). If
you're not getting any sound and the ALSA mixer isn't set to mute, then try
hitting one of the volume buttons.Modem
Audio