Installing Debian Sid (October 2008) on a ThinkPad X200

Creating installation device

The X200 has no cd/dvd but can boot from USB. On the X200 BIOS settings, the USB disk boot option needed to be raised to be used first. Using F1 at boot gives access to the BIOS.

I created an USB bootable iso from another linux installation. I had an usb stick with a FAT32 partition on /dev/sdc1. I dowloaded the boot and iso file and installed the image using:

 wget http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/boot.img.gz
 wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso
 zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/sdc1
 mkdir /mnt/sdc1
 mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1
 cp debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso /mnt/sdc1

The boot stick will use the network to install the package but a more complete ISO image can be dowloaded.

The wifi will not work (see Installing_Debian_on_an_X200) but the Ethernet card will. In theory it should be possible build custom Debian Live USB stick, using the latest package and install from there, I didn't manage so far.

Sid installation

To install sid use the expert installation support and choose unstable for the repository.

Backup hard drive data

In order to save the hard drive content, I created complete hard drive image on another hard disk. During the installation procedure I activated another shell with CTRL-ALT-F3, mounted an external HD (/dev/sdb1) and copied the image with:

 mkdir /mnt/sdb1
 mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1/
 dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/sda-image

In principle partimage is better option but the installation image does not have it. Also gzipping the partition on the fly would have bin better, but the gzip or bzip2 were not present. Using a custom Debian Live installation image would solve the problem.

Wifi

Put in the /etc/apt/source.list

 deb http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel trunk main 

Installed linux-image-2.6.27-1 and firmware

 wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11.tar.gz
 tar xvfz iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11.tar.gz
 cp  iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11/iwlwifi-5000-1.ucode /lib/firmware
 aptitude install linux-image-2.6.27-1-686 hal

Special keys

Work out of the box. The keycodes are

 227 Fn
 234 Tab left
 233 Tab right
 176 Volume up
 174 Volume dn

Mute and ThinkVantage do not work

Issues

To be addressed: sound, suspend to ram, accelerated video, firefox

TO BE CONTINUED