Installing Fedora 8 on a ThinkPad T61p
Contents
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.
Please look here for further informations as well:
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:
- vesa mode, no 3D support
- nVidia drivers, download from the vendor
- nVidia drivers by livna (prefered)
The last options is provided by following packages: kmod-nvidia, xorg-x11-drv-nvidia. To enable full support of your display add vga=893 as bootloader option for your kernel.
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
As of kernel update: 2.6.23.9-85 and its linked drivers from livna funtion keys are working even in X and the nvidia driver.
Audio
Is fully working now. Muting is working and unmuting with the volume keys as well. If you are using KDE then you have to choose "Threaded Open Sound System" as audio system in the control center. I could not use PulseAudio (make sure you do not install kde-settings-pulseaudio or pulseaudio). With PulseAudio the sound was always delayed and the cpu usage was very high.
The volume keys are only standard keys now with the keycodes 174 and 176. So you have to assign them to mixer control actions. For that KDE needs a keysymname to be able to assign it in its mixer controls. So you can add following lines to the file /etc/X11/Xmodmap:
keycode 174 = 0xffd2
keycode 176 = 0xffd3
Now the volume keys are sending F21 and F22 which I assigned to the global shortcut in the kmix configuration for volume up and down. Furthermore I added a link in the ~/.kde/Autostart folder to kmix to make sure it is always started (somehow it will not restart itself).
Network
Ethernet and Wlan is fully supported. Wlan will be detected as wlan0.
Suspend to RAM
Working.
Suspend to Disk / Hibernate
Has display problems (black after resume until hard reset), 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.
