Installing Fedora 8 on a ThinkPad T61p

Introduction

This document outlines configuring Fedora 8 on your Thinkpad T61p. Most items will work out of the box and a base install will provide you with an almost completely working system. Due to the modular nature of the T61 there are many different configuration, please read carefully and only make the changes specific to your system.

Feel free to update this Wiki with your information however please ask questions on the Talk page.

Installation Notes

• Booting from the installation CD/DVD is only working in text mode due to the nVidia cards, you can use later vesa mode or nVidia drivers or livna nVidia drivers for X

Display/Video

You have following alternatives for your graphics in X:

1. vesa mode, no 3D support
2. nVidia drivers, download from the vendor
3. nVidia drivers by livna (prefered)

The last options is provided by following packages: kmod-nvidia, xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.

Mouse

Important note: the synaptics driver, which is detected by default does not give the acceleration setting to a attached mouse or the trackpoint. Please replace the section for the synaptics driver with the following one:

   Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier "Logitech"
       Driver "mouse"
       Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
       Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
       Option "Protocol" "auto"
   EndSection

Brightness

source: Installing Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on a ThinkPad T61

Nvidia Quadro N140 and 570M:

The brightness controls do not work, however you can switch to a virtual terminal (ctrl+alt+F1) increase or decrease the brightness and then switch back to X (ctrl+alt+F7) without disrupting the running applications. In a few rare cases switching back to X (ctrl+alt+7) may freeze your computer with a black screen so save any open documents before switching out.

When using the vesa driver the brightness controls do work. So this problem seems to be related to the nvidia driver.

Audio

Working, volume keys not tested yet.

Network

Ethernet and Wlan is fully supported. Wlan will be detected as wlan0.

Suspend to RAM / Hibernate

Working.

Suspend to Disk

Has display problems (not restartet after resume), perhaps tuxonice should give a try.

Fingerprint Reader

Is supported by the thinkfinger package. Gnome and KDM (kde login manager) seem to be working quite well, KDE is not fully supported yet.

Install thinkfiner package and edit /etc/pam.d/system-auth and add the pam_thinkfinger.so module right before pam_unix.so. So your system-auth should start like this:

  #%PAM-1.0
  # This file is auto-generated.
  # User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run.
  auth        required      pam_env.so
  auth	    sufficient	  pam_thinkfinger.so
  auth        sufficient    pam_unix.so nullok try_first_pass
  auth        requisite     pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 500 quiet
  auth        required      pam_deny.so
  ...

Then save a fingerprint for each user that is allowed to log in via fingerprint. For example, for the account auser this is done with

   tf-tool --add-user auser

Now whenever you are asked to enter the password for auser, you can also swipe your finger:

   [anotheruser@thinkpad ~]$ su auser
   Password or swipe finger: 
   [auser@thinkpad ~]$

You probably want to enroll the root account so you can just su to the superuser without entering the root password.

Memory

I had to use the PAE kernel to be able to use all 4GB, otherwise a maximum of 3GB is only seen.