Installing Fedora 8 on a ThinkPad T61p

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:

• Installing Fedora 8 Generic Notes

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

Note: The for the initial install of older Windows (XP/Server 2k3 Gold & SP1) disks you need the SATA interface to operate in Compatibility mode; however, Fedora 8 needs it in AHCI mode. If T61p is set to Compatibility mode in BIOS, install will likely hang or display giberish.

Display/Video

You have following alternatives for your graphics in X:

1. vesa mode, no 3D support
2. nVidia drivers, download from the vendor
3. 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.

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.

Mouse

Important note: the Synaptics TouchPad driver for X, 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

To get further button support of more than three buttons of your super mouse you should have a look at following software: http://www.ollisalonen.com/btnx

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 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

KDE users should put these codes in ~/.Xmodmap and use following script "xmodmap.sh" in the ~/.kde/Autostart folder (KDE uses not the standard xinit files):

   #!/bin/sh
   [ -e "$HOME/.Xmodmap" ] && xmodmap $HOME/.Xmodmap

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).

Issues

Sound driver seems to crash sometimes before or after suspend. Please share you experiences, do you know of any relating bugs?

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

The integrated fingerprint reader supported by the thinkfinger package. Gnome and KDM (kde login manager) seem to be working quite well, KDE is not fully supported yet. See "How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger" for configuration information and tips.

Update: see How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader for alternatives.

Memory

Using the 32bit version of Fedora, I had to use the PAE kernel to be able to use all 4GB, otherwise a maximum of 3GB is only seen. With the 64bit (x86_64) all memory is seen perfectly.