Installing Fedora 10 on a ThinkPad T400

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T400 Site under construction. You are invited building an useful guidance!

BIOS Issues To Deal With Before Installation

If you have a t400 (or T500 for that matter) that has the Switchable Graphics there are some things you need to know about

  • The switchable graphics doesn't really "work" so much under Linux. This is unfortunate, but there are plenty of discussion as to the why's and hows of this. So as a Linux user you get a choice at boot as to which one you want.
      • Go into the BIOS on boot (F1) go into Config -> Display -> Graphics Device
    • Either way you are going to want to DISABLE OS detection of switchable graphics. Don't ask me why, but the BIOS has a tendency to switch the actual display adapter out from under you.
    • You must now choose either the EXTERNAL display (I.E. the ATI/AMD graphics card) or the INTERNAL (I.E. the on board Intel graphics)

This step really needs to be done before you try to do the install or setup Linux. Now you can change this at any time, but keep in mind that you will likely need to make changes to your xorg.conf file to have it switch decently. You can take a look at and try something like this blog post but this is left to the user to try / experiment with.

What just works (tm)

  • Wireless with iwlagn driver (Intel WiFi Link 5100/5300 WLAN controller)
    • 802.11bg both work fine along with WEP/WPA/WPA2, status LED lights up and does what you would expect. NetworkManager seems to do the right thing, no issues there
  • Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller
    • No issues here, plug in a cable and it just works
  • Intel driver for Integrated Graphics (Intel Integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD)
    • Just works, quite happy. Detects the screen properly as 1440x900 and just goes with it. Kudos to the Xorg team (now get working on the [[1]])
  • UltraNav (Touchpoint and Trackpad)
    • Horizontal and Vertical scrolling just worked.
  • Optical drive
  • Sound card
    • To use your internal microphone you have to change to "HDA Intel CONEXANT Analog (ALSA)" in audio-settings.
  • 7-in-1 card reader from Ricoh (MMC, Memory Stick, Mem Stick Pro, SD, SDHC, XD, XD Type H Memory)
    • I've only tested with SD & SDHC (as that's all I have at the moment) but they work fine. The system very quickly recognizes that you've inserted a disk, and mounts it as you would expect. Please note you need to push the card into it so that it's flush (you'll hear a click). To eject push on it and it will eject.
  • Thinklight control (This is BIOS only anyway so does not have the issue with the button problems mentioned below)
  • Wireless toggle mechanical toggle switch (at the front) - works and is detected by the system.
  • Built-in webcam with Skype, along with using the built-in microphone (used pulse audio for the output and the input is circumventing pulse right now)
  • ACPI in general seems to work, battery status, fan status, temperatures, etc.
  • Optical (ultrabay) hot swapping
    • It just works, pull the drive out Linux will happily disable and remove it, put it back in and Linux detects and deals with adding it back in. Go sata drives!
  • Bluetooth
    • I was able to pair with several devices including a keyboard and two phones. Was unable to do much more than get the keyboard to work but bluetooth does work.

Untested


Issues with Fedora 10

Ok so I'll admit, I did a fresh install and expected everything to just work (tm) - it didn't quite. There are a few things that still need to be tweaked to make it all work but it's getting there

Pulseaudio w/ GStreamer

So fresh install and setup a new user account and log in. *BOOM* first thing you are greated with is the gnome-volume-control crashing and hitting reload will just come back with 'no crashed again reload or remove from panel'. Further if you try to start gnome-volume-control and get a dialogue window that says "No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found." If you install the nautilus-sound-converter and you find that nautilus doesn't load at all, this is also a symptom. You are likely hitting the same problem for all of these issues. The problem *seems* to be that the permissions on the gstreamer directory in your home dir is set in correctly. Easiest way to fix this is to do: 

 chmod -R 777 ~/.gstreamer-0.10;rm -rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10

After you do this things should work as you would expect again.

Extra Thinkpad buttons only work for root

I will admit I do not have a fix for this one yet, but it is one that is annoying me greatly. Basically things like the volume control, display brightness, control over bluetooth being on/off, etc or anything that uses the <Fn> key or the volume controls only works for the root user. Since it seems to work for the root user I'm guessing this is a permissions problem, but I have not tracked it down yet.

NOTE: things like the 'ThinkLight' that are fully BIOS controlled are not affected by this and work as expected. So far all I've seen that does this is the ThinkLight but I haven't done and exhaustive check.

Addendum: So I got the brightness display working as the non-root user if your under Gnome go under: 

 System -> Preferences -> System -> Power Management

Once that loads you'll see a small icon added in your notification bar that looks like a battery, the brightness display should now work.

Addendum 2: So I got the audio buttons working as well for non-root users. If your under Gnome go under: 

 System -> Preferences -> System -> PulseAudio Preferences

One that loads you should have access to the buttons. Volume Up/Down will display and actually change the volume. The Mute button will actually mute the audio, however you won't see any indication of it sadly.

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