Installing Ubuntu 7.04 on a ThinkPad T43

Installation Log of Ubuntu 6.06 on a T43

ATTENTION!

BE CAREFUL, THIS IS STILL A DRAFT!

Overview

Worked right out of the box

• 1400*1050 resolution
• Battery Management
• Ultra Nav (Trackpoint and synaptic touchpad)
• WLAN (Atheros, IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter II)
• Hibernate and Standby
• Fn keys (switch between monitors untested)
• Audio Keys
• ThinkLight
• ATI 3D Acceleration (Mobility Radeon X300)
• AIGLX / Compiz

Was easy or required some work

Untested

• middle key of Ultra Nav (Trackpoint)
• Fingerprint reader
• Forward/Backward keys, Access IBM Key* Bluetooth (light indicates working)
• Modem
• IrDA
• TV out, VGA out
• Active Protection System (acceleration sensor works 'out of the box' in edgy, but hard disk parking needs kernel recompile)

Failed / still requires work

Installation

I just installed Feisty using the graphical installer.

ATTENTION!

Installing grub to the MBR may hurt your Rescue 'n' Recovery Partition!

If you want to keep you Rescue 'n' Recovery Partition, read this blog entry.

Whatever you do, you should care about Backups etc. yourself. A starting point is given in Installing Ubuntu 6.10 on a ThinkPad T43#Installation

The only non-free driver that was activated was atheros for wifi access. For graphics the free ati/radeon driver was activated, the restricted ati alternative fglrx was installed but not enabled. I did not try it.

Configuration

3D Acceleration and Compiz

3D Acceleration and Compiz worked out of the box for me. Just activate it in the system menu under desktop effects. I had some minor issues, but I blame the beta status for that. To test if 3D Acceleration it works, if you have problems, type

$ glxinfo | grep rendering

The answer should be: "direct rendering: Yes". If it says "No", you don't have 3D acceleration.

3D Acceleration Beryl

TODO

Active Protection System

TODO

See end of this chapter if you have ubuntu edgy eft.

The T43 has a great system to protect your hard disk, the Active Protection System APS. How to protect the harddisk through APS describes how you can use it.

ATTENTION!

Only follow these instructions if you know what you are doing!

If you didn't until now you will have to install make, libc, gcc, ... Best is you use

$ sudo apt-get install build-essentials

Determine your kernel version using

$ uname -a

You should see somthing like

Linux ibm 2.6.15-26-386 #1 PREEMPT Thu Aug 3 02:52:00 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

Install the kernel sources "linux-source" e.g. using Synaptic. Download the right kernel patch from HDAPS#Applications according to your kernel version and system (I chose "sata/ide disk protection patch for 2.6.15") adapt following steps to your needs:

$ cd /usr/src/
$ sudo su
# bunzip2 linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2
# tar -xf linux-source-2.6.15.tar
# cd linux-source-2.6.15
# patch -p1 -l < /home/silvan/hdaps_protect.20060118.patch

You should see several lines with the word "suceeded". If you see many "failed" instead you probably chose the wrong patch for your kernel. You can use the --dry-run option to try it out first. If you get errors in the following steps you should better stop unless you know what you are doing.

# make clean
# make oldconfig # use old config, ask for new items, only
# make clean
# make           # takes quite a long time, several minutes
# make modules
# make modules_install

Afterwards use the debian sources mentioned in How to protect the harddisk through APS to install the user space deamon hdapsd and the gnome applet gnome-hdaps-applet, e.g. using Synaptic.

If this worked for you, you can find some nice applications at HDAPS#Applications which make use of the APS.

Help needed

For me unfortunately it didn't work as making the patched kernel failed. Please update ths section if you have different experiences and a better, more detailed working explanation.

NOTE!

After I updated to edgy eft hdaps works without further work: edgy comes with hdaps built in. You can check if it is working by installing hdaps-utils

# sudo apt-get install hdaps-utils

and calling

# hdaps-gl

for a nice 3D show. If it is not, load the kernel module using

# sudo modprobe hdaps

and it should work. But if you want to use hdaps for disk protection, you have to recompile your kernel in edgy, too. Follow this post for an howto:

Howto for edgy

Track Point Middle Key Scrolling

In my case the track point worked out of the box, but the middle mouse button for scrolling did not. How to configure the TrackPoint explains how to solve this. The steps you need to follow are in section "Using the X server (kernel 2.6.11+)". However you don't need to follow the steps in "EmulateWheelTimeout temporarily broken (-> fix for Ubuntu Dapper)" as this is fixed already if you have all your packages up-to-date.

Follow the instructions in the sections "Configure firefox for using trackpoint horizontal scrolling" and "Configure Opera for using trackpoint horizontal scrolling" as well, if you are using one of the two browsers.

Fingerprint Reader

How to enable the fingerprint reader has a good explanation for a very complicated way of activating your fingerprint reader using a restricted driver.

An alternative to this is available at [1]: How to enable the fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger provides more details.

Forward / Backward Keys, Access IBM

Just follow this HowTo for the configuration you prefer: How to get special keys to work

IrDA

Find information here: How to make use of IrDA

VGA out

I didn't try it, but it looks easy: How to enable VGA out

References

• Dapper Drake on T42

Hope this helped :-) tec