Installing Debian Sid (October 2008) on a ThinkPad X200
Contents
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
Sound
Everything works, but in a strange way. The hardware volume control is managed by acpi
$ cat /proc/acpi/ibm/volume level: 8 mute: off commands: up, down, mute commands: level <level> (<level> is 0-15)
The mute button is linked to the mute command, but volume up and down are passed to X with keycode 176 174. I thought that acpi was intercepting the key and send them to X using fakekey. I played in /etc/acpi/events but I didn't managed to change behavior.
Skype
Everything works downloading the version for Etch.
Suspend
Suspend to disk works using the buttons. Suspend to ram does not work.
TO BE CONTINUED
