HOWTOs - Driver Installation

This page holds information on how to make additional hardware work on your ThinkPad. The pages linked here hold instructions for installing or configuring certain drivers to make them work with ThinkPad hardware. For an overview of the drivers themselves please look at the Drivers page.

Connectivity

• Bluetooth (How to enable and configure Bluetooth)
• IrDA (How to get IrDA working)

Graphics

• RADEON Driver for X (Additional options for the radeon driver)
• Proprietary RADEON Driver for X (fglrx)
• Open Source RADEON (ATI) Driver for X
• TV-out on ATI chips (Get TV-out working)
• How to compile an experimental X server

Input

• TrackPoint configuration (How to make your TrackPoint behave as you wish)

PowerManagement

• SpeedStep on piix4 (How to make SpeedStep (cpufreq) work on Coppermine-piix4-smi based ThinkPads)
• SpeedStep on P4-class Celeron (How to get SpeedStep working on P4-class-Celeron based ThinkPads)
• cpufreqd¹ (How to configure the cpufreqd frequency scaling daemon)
• cpufrequtils¹ (How to use the cpufrequtils frequency scaling utils)
• powernowd ¹ (How to configure the powernowd frequency scaling daemon)
• powersaved¹ (How to configure the powersaved frequency scaling daemon)

Safety & Security

• How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader
• How to protect the harddisk through APS (How to make automatic emergency disk head parking work)

SL Driver

• SL Driver on Ubuntu (How to get Alexandre Rostovtsev's SL-series driver working with Ubuntu)

Storage devices (harddisk, cdrom)

• How to configure and use libata SATA / PATA drivers

Sound

• CS4239 sound chip in PNP mode (How to make it work on the ThinkPad 600E)

Wireless LAN

• ndiswrapper for Intel 2200bg (ndiswrapper configuration for intel/pro 2200BG)
• ndiswrapper for IBM 11 a/b/g (ndiswrapper for IBM 11 a/b/g)
• ndiswrapper for ThinkPad 11a/b/g/n(ndiswrapper for ThinkPad 11a/b/g/n)
• ipw2100 (native Linux driver for Intel 2100)
• ipw2200 (native Linux driver for Intel 2200/2915)
• madwifi (Linux driver for atheros chipsets)
• orinoco (Linux driver for Hermes/Prism chipsets)
• hostap (Alternative Linux driver for Hermes/Prism chipsets)
• wpa_supplicant (How to compile and configure wpa_supplicant)

Additional Hardware

• IBM UltraCam II (How to make the IBM UltraCam II work under Linux)

• How to get the internal SD card working (Howto patch and build the modules)

FOOTNOTES [Δ]

1. Don't forget that the newer kernels have fancier cpu frequency governors like OnDemand and Conservative that are easy to configure via SysFS. These governors are adequate in many situations and do not require user-space daemons such as cpufreqd, powersaved, or powernowd. Read more about it on the Dynamic Frequency Scaling page.