Installing Gentoo on IBM T41

squareHat · Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2004 10:23 pm Post subject: Installing Gentoo on IBM T41

Installing Gentoo on IBM T41

Note: This is a work in progress...

Just picked up a new IBM T41 2394-DJU.

I have been running gentoo on a R31 for about a year, I remember it took me a few weeks (OK months:-) to get it really working perfectly with that machine.

This time round I thought I would create a how to of all the steps to get the machine up and humming. Hopefully this will be a help other T41 Linux and Gentoo users.

I bought a new drive, One for linux and one for that other operating system that I need from time to time... If you need to share the drive with windows follow one of the excellent guides out there.

BIOS CHANGES

I turned off:

*Power Mode for AC : Custom
*Power Mode for Battery : Custom
I defined the Custom mode as follows:
* Processor speed : Fixed Max
* Suspend Timer : Disabled
* LCD off timer : Disabled
* HDD off timer : 3 Min

Install Steps: (if you have never installed Gentoo read the excellent installation guide and use this as notes)

I used x86-Basic-1.4-20030911.iso to boot the machine.

balou · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2004 Posts: 2

Great!!! I have juste bought the same notebook and i planned to install a gentoo on it shortly.
Thx for your precious information.

ph03n1x · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 756

Great tutorial

Didn't need though

but it would have helped me

I'm messing around with xf86 atm, it says no screen found...

However on my previous install i somehow made it work with ati-drivers but i cannot remember how, too bad ...

Ian · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 6:49 am Post subject:

Very nice guide.

I'm hoping on getting a T41 for college in a few months, but that depends on how much my parents feel like giving me. I'd probably need Windows on it as well, for school, but oh well, at least this guide will save me some time with X11 and such.

Speaking of X11, can you try to install X.org's X11 implementation, instead of XFree86? I'd like to know if there's any issues with that, though I doubt it.

ph03n1x · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 756

Me again

Did u get those LEDs working? My W-Lan led and the num-lock stay dark, althout both functions are working correct. Any progress concerning ati?

I have actually a t41p and shell runs @ 1440x1050 and X did so too. Since I emerged gnome it doesn't want to do more than 1280x1024 weird, eh?

cineto · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 5:07 pm Post subject:

You may want to try synaptics drivers., then you will get:

vrghost · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 48 Location: London

Just received one of these T41 and playing around with it. But there are three devices I still have not got running.

1. WiFi interface
Found a lot of docs on how to get it running. But right now it is rather unimportant. Will have to wait until tomorrow or something.

2. IRDa interface.
Might be fun, but not important at the moment, but anyone who knows what chipset/driver to use, please do tell.

3. Bluetooth interface.
This is the one that I realy want running. And I have a problem finding any kind of info on how to get the bluetooth environment running properly.

So if anyone happens to have a clue how I can get the IRDA and the bluetooth working in the kernel I would owe that person a pint. And I stand by my word (even though you might have to be in London for the occasion)

phuber · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 6:43 pm Post subject:

Kernel 2.6: For bluetooth support, enable that bluetooth protocols found under networking then enable the bluetooth-usb device driver since the bluetooth chip is internally hooked to the usb. fn-f5 to enable the chip.

I compiled it as a module so I can load that as needed and save power when I don't need bt.

I tried connecting to my ericsson but that didn't seem to work at all. Nevertheless, the kernel config mentioned above should basically work.

--

I myself have lots of troubles getting 3D to work. There are ton's of hints out there but nothing seems to work. I also wonder why I have to enter this ChipID in the X config and what value it should be. Nothing seems to work

And since xfree-drm is kernel 2.4 only (as of now) I'm messing with the ati fglrx driver but...

Has anyone a working X setup with 3D under 2.6? I'd love to have a look at you configs...

kpoman · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 11:30 pm Post subject:

Hello!
I am very interested in buying that laptop, they say its autonomy is very good! But I know IBM uses its own software to enhance battery length;
I'd like to know if its gonna work well with Linux. Could someone please tell, using same apps, whats the ratio between windows and linux lifetime cycle ?
thanks

_________________
please, help me, pity on me :'(

squareHat · Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 6:49 pm Post subject:

I don't know much about the enhancement for windows.

But you can throttle the CPU, under Linux

you can use ACPI, or you can use APM,

I am still using APM as I still are using a 2.4 kernel, so you can suspend, blank the screen when your not doing anything.

In order to get the disk to power down you will need to change the journalling options on whatever filesystem you choose.

phuber · Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 7:15 pm Post subject:

I found acpi to be somewhat not working. x does not survive a suspend regardless of the video card driver so I went back to APM (kernel 2.6).

cpu frequency scaling works very well with the modules speedstep_centrino and freq_table loaded and the powernowd loaded (the powernowd is cpu-independent). cpufreqd didn't seem to work at all.

ph03n1x · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 756

Enable also the speedstepping stuff for the kernel, this works as well

Concerning xorg i can say it works

phuber · Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 10:05 am Post subject:

My last post wasn't clear. It should've read something like speedstep didn't work for a while but now does with modules x, y and the powernowd.

From my observations, it seems that speedstep doesn't work automatically - you need a daemon that tells the cpu what speed to run at.

For XFree... You got everything working with 2.6, acpi, and what video driver? So far, the X radeon driver was the only one to wake up reliably from suspend. And that under apm only.

Could you please post the important parts of your config files etc?

thanks

OSTSJoe · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2003 Posts: 18

Nice howto. I've got a t41 with gentoo and 2.6. I've got throttling working agressivly and tried all sorts of tweaks with the hard drive, but I can't get the battery to last over 2.5 hours. I even called ibm and had them overnight me a new battery (hows that for customer service) but that didn't help at all. Anyone know whats causing this?

!db! · Posted: Fri Jun 18, 2004 2:11 pm Post subject:

Hello,

I just bought a T41 (should be getting it next week). I currently use Gentoo on 2 other computers: 1 desktop and a Thinkpad 600. Both have dual boot with XP.

IBM preinstalls XP Pro (under, I believe, a single NTFS partition) on T41s. They offer a reinstallation disk which resets everything to factory settings. I've never really had any problems dual-booting with my other machines, but I'm slightly concerned about this one ... what are you experiences, and/or how have you manage to dual-boot (or are you all using Gentoo only)?

Thanks for any feedback (and great overview of a Gentoo install on a T41!)

barlad · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2003 Posts: 673

No problem dual booting here. I resized my NTFS partition using PartitionMagic (there are a lot of freewares/sharewares out there for that kind of work) then installed gentoo on the freespace. I am using grub to dual boot.

There are a few things that I still have to make work on my T41:

- Fn+F12 for suspend to disk. Neither apm or acpi seem to recognize that event. (it is not even logged). Regular suspend to disk works well unless I activate dri.

- Fn + F2 for "blank out screen" is not recognized by ACPI. Not sure how I can make that work.

- Suspend to Ram crashes due to X. It's due to dri. Did any of you manage to have resume work with X using dri (either ati or xfree drivers)?

- Cannot use IBM sensors. You have to use ACPI if you want to get CPU temperature and a few other information. lm-sensors won't work since apparently some IBM laptops can get their hardware corrupted if you are trying to use lm-sensors on them.

!db! · Posted: Fri Jun 18, 2004 3:50 pm Post subject:

Thanks barlad!

Going through another forum on thinkpads, resizing the NTFS seems like the preferred option. My question now would be how much resizing is possible? Could you split up a 30GB hard drive into 2?

barlad · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2003 Posts: 673

Yeah without any problem. As far as I remember, you can resize your partition as much as you want as long as it does not imply deleting some datas (otherwise it would ruin the whole purpose of "resizing").

lblblb · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jun 2003 Posts: 75

Hi,

I'm having problems with my grub config. I came across your documentation. It's great, very easy to follow (except note the difference for the 2.6 kernel in the make bzImage)

I know this will sound funny, given that I'm having problems with grub, but I think you may have mis-written grub/partition related info. Please confirm.

You say your partitions are:

miju · n00b Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 15 Location: Germany

Hi there,

since kernel 2.6.7 i got everything work i need:

Suspend to Ram with ACPI
Software Suspend (swsusp2)
both with the r200 DRM without crashes and working usb after resume

the only thing that i don't like is to restart the computer if i want to use atitvout...

do you know alternatives?

phuber · Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2004 9:18 pm Post subject:

I'm still having problems with acpi. Could you please post the following things:

- XF86config
- Kernel Config
- /etc/acpi

Thanks!

miju · n00b Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 15 Location: Germany

I use the 2.6.7 stable Kernel from kernel.org

patched with software-suspend-2.0.0.88-for-2.6.7 from swsusp.sourceforge.net

I installed the drm r200 and common files from http://www.freedesktop.org/~dri/snapshots

I am using xorg-x11 because software suspend with xfree 4.3 and drm did not work.

my .config:
http://www.student.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~fabio_l/t40_config/.config

my xorg.conf
http://www.student.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~fabio_l/t40_config/xorg.conf

my suspend script:
http://www.student.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~fabio_l/t40_config/suspram.sh

important lines in the /etc/suspend.conf are:
SWSUSP_LEAVE_X_BEFORE_SUSPEND="nvidia"
SWSUSP_UNLOAD_MODULES_BEFORE_SUSPEND="yes"

Hope that helps.

Greets Fabio

vrghost · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 48 Location: London

First, nice walkthrough, saves time, and thats allways nice.

Jupp, someone decided that I should have one of these small nice T41 (think it is the T41P, it is the one with Wi-Fi and bluthouth, also a gigabit ethernet adapter, last time I installed it on this machine it seem to take the eepro100 driver but not anymore, (yes this is the second time, I was stupid enough to actually belive that the internal winblows team at my company would understand that I did not mean ghost my disk when I said dont touch the partition table).

Anyway, the driver seems to be

(have some problems with sockets on this one, so if you are building from stage one you might want to wait a while with this one)
Will get back to this some other day.

e1000. so just modprobe that after boot and it seems to do the trick, will add any other usefull information I find (so I can find it the next time I or someone else manage to fuck up the install

)

!db! · Posted: Mon Jul 05, 2004 6:30 pm Post subject:

I just bought a T41 from IBM (2378DMF). Here's a bit of info on how I successfully configured gentoo-dev-sources. Thanks to all previous Gentoo'ers who successfully, through trial and error, managed to configure various thinkpads ... and who have posted their experiences.

I need, like many, a Win/'Nix combo (dual-boot), so I first let the T41 boot straight out of the box so the IBM preinstallation XP PRO/NTFS setup could do it's thing. Changed the BIOS so it could boot from CDs. Then defragged the HD and resized the NTFS partition with QtParted available on the SystemRescueCD. Only kept 8GB for Gentoo ...

2.6.7-r8 stage 1 installation from a 1.4 LiveCD downloaded over 6 months ago. Didn't try setting up the built-in wireless at first, instead went for the built-in ethernet. A few tweaks and away I went ...

fdisk /dev/hda

Eagle_ · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jun 2004 Posts: 119

Hi
I bought recently a T41 (IBM ThinkPad) computer and i install Gentoo on it.

I had been told it would be good for the battery to be empty completly once a month. I saw at my friend computer (runing windows on it) that he had a program he can acces it while the computer just starting by pressing on Access IBM. This program can empty his computer battery completly. I didnt press on Access IBM before i install my gentoo on my computer so i dont know if i where having this program or not.

My qestion is: Is there a program from linux which can empty the battery completly? or i just suppose to use the battery until the computer crash by out of battery volts? (I think the second way is not so good).

P.S

I bought the bigger battry cepasety, and it last for about 6.5h with XFCE4 and about 5.8-5.9 with KDE 3.2.2

Thanks