Installing OpenSUSE 11.1 on a ThinkPad R61

Model

Lenovo Thinkpad R61 8919-6VG, BIOS 7KETC6WW (2.26)

General

This installation instruction describes these parts that do not or do not completely work after my OpenSUSE 11.1 Final DVD installation using KDE 4.1 as window manager. If anything does not work as expected, please have a look at the older Installation of OpenSUSE 11.0 on a ThinkPad R61 for possible workarounds that I forgot to mention here.

Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M

NOTE!

When booting the installation DVD, the resolution selected in the GRUB menu will eventually yield to an X with the same resolution. Use SaX2 to change the display resolution to the correct one.

To install and configure the NVIDIA driver, follow the instructions of the openSUSE Wiki [1]. As an alternative, add the NVIDIA Repository via Software, Software Repositories, Add, Community Repositories in YaST.

ATTENTION!

There is a NVIDIA driver bug resulting in a black screen logging out or quitting X via Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. You will not be able to get back a working console or KDE. However, it is still possible to reboot cleanly by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del.

As a workaround, change ServerTimeout to 45 in /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc. Logging out will take some time, but eventually the login screen comes back. Thanks to Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

UltraNav

TouchPad

I do not use the TouchPad, thus, I disabled it in the BIOS settings.

Trackpoint

SaX configures the Trackpoint in a way that it can be used to perform scrolling, similar to Windows.

Power management

Suspend to RAM and Suspend to Disk work out of the box. However, resuming from Suspend to Disk takes about 1 or 2 minutes while displaying a black screen.

Integrated fingerprint reader

ThinkFinger does not work. This is because the fingerprint sensor is now a UPEK TouchStrip (USB vendor ID 0x147e), see Integrated Fingerprint Reader#Open Source.

Update: See How to enable the integrated fingerprint reader.