Installing LFS on a ThinkPad T41p

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Graphics

internal, AGP: ATI Radeon FireGL T2

You have two choices: xorgs radeon driver or ATIs fglrx driver. The xorg driver works fine, but doesn't support DRI. A solution is underway with the R300 driver. Also, support for a docks or port replicators DVI port is theoretically available, but practically not possible. This is being worked on as well.

PCI of dock: ATI Radeon 9000

I made several attempts to get this card working under x.org, with no success, or very limited one. With both x.org radeon driver and ATIs fglrs driver the system totally freezes when you try enabling the card in your config. This seems to be a problem with PCI scanning/handling in x.org.

I managed once to get the PCI card alone working after switching the primary display device to PCI in the BIOS.

Drives

Harddisk: Hitachi Travelstar HTS548080M9AT00

I replaced the original harddrive (60GB at 7260RPM) with the 80GB/5480RPM model from Hitachi (which are the ones that IBM labels for their purposes). For some speed optimizations you might try the following (at your own risk):

# hdparm -c 3 -u 1 -X 99 -k 1 /dev/hda

DVD/CDRW Combo: Toshiba SD-R9012

The drive works pretty fine with the kernels standard IDE CD-ROM driver. You can burn CDs using cdrecord in ATAPI mode. Alternatively you may use ide-scsi and treat the device as a SCSI drive.

Ultrabay 2000 ZIP Drive (in docks Ultrabay 2000)

Works great using the kernels ide-disk driver.

Sound: ...

TODO
needs to be filled

Networking

LAN: Intel Pro/1000 (82540EP)

Compile the e1000 driver into the kernel or as module (CONFIG_E1000). You might want to take a look at ifplugd.

Wireless LAN: Atheros AR5212 802.11abg (aka IBM a/b/g)

The madwifi project will be your friend. You might want to give waproamd a try.

Modem

never used

PCMCIA

Just enable the PCMCIA support in the kernel configuration and with it the cardbus driver and the thing will work great. A Xircom CardCaddy as well as some other CompactFlash adapter both worked.

USB

Enable the EHCI and UHCI drivers in your kernel config. You might need to unload them before suspending and reload them on resume if you use ACPI. This is a kernel issue and should be solved in latest kernels.

Specials

UltraBay

I didn't have success trying to enable hotplugging. Using ibm-acpi you can get events for the UltraBay eject lever, but i didn't manage to make hdparm unregister the IDE device. On my system it executes the command giving no error but afterwards the IDE device still shows up in /proc.

ThinkLight

Works by pressing FnPageUp, since it's controlled by the BIOS.
See this page for further information.

special keys

By using ibm-acpi, tpb and xmodmap you can make use of all the specific special keys.
Have a look here on how to configure them.

Trackpoint

The trackpoint is a PS/2 device. Look here for a advanced settings/finetuning.

Touchpad

TODO
needs to be filled

Docking Station (IBM ThinkPad Full Dock II)

The thing works great. PCMCIA and all the ports were recognised by default. The docks IDE interface is a CMD 648, so you should enable the according kernel option (building as module didn't work for me), if you want to use anything else than a floppy in the docks UltraBay. Note that the interface will most likely be ide2 and ide3 then, so the docks UltraBay drive will be hde.

Power Management

The T41p is APM and ACPI capable. See How to make use of Power Management features.

External Sources