Installing Kubuntu 6.10 on a ThinkPad X60s 2

Installation of Kubuntu 6.10 on a ThinkPad X60s (model 1704-5UG)

Functional out of the box

With updates to 2007-01-12:

• Sound and mixer
• Graphics adapter and accelerator (Intel GMA 950)
• USB
• Lid switch (LCD off when lid closed)
• Volume control keys, keyboard light
• LCD brightness auto-adjusts depending on AC or battery operation
• Fn buttons generate ACPI events (/var/log/acpid)
• CPU frequency scaling (both cores)
• ACPI battery, thermal 1 and 2, ac
• Suspend to memory (though not with button) and resume
• Suspend to disk, "hibernate" (though not with button) and resume
• SD card station (SDIO not tested)
• Cable ethernet (e1000)
• WiFi (Intel 3945ABG) with WEP (WPA not tested)
• Bluetooth
• Radio enable/disable (Fn+F5) for both WiFi and bluetooth

Broken/suboptimal out of the box

Brightness control

Blanks X, and stays blank until X is restarted, if you increase brightness with Fn+Home. Brightness controlled by dialog windows doesn't cause this.

The workaround is to disable video.o

echo blacklist video | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/local

After doing that, there's a 1 second lag between pressing the key, and the actual change in brightness until you reboot.

acpi-support

in /etc/default/acpi-support

• Enable laptop-mode (/proc/sys/vm/laptop-mode): ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true

/etc/init.d/acpi-support restart

Fn+F4 and Fn+F12 suspend

cd /etc/acpi
sudo mv sleepbtn.sh{,.orig}
sudo mv hibernatebtn.sh{,.orig}
sudo ln -s sleep{,btn}.sh
sudo ln -s hibernate{,btn}.sh

Now the hotkeys work. Yay!

Slow boot

Ubuntu wants to DHCP on all network interfaces by default, which causes a long delay in booting up. This can be resolved by removing the "auto" lines for all interfaces that you don't use, in /etc/network/interfaces.

By default, Grub on Ubuntu waits 10 seconds before starting Linux. I set it to 1 in /boot/grub/menu.lst