Installing OpenSUSE 12.3 on a ThinkPad T500

Model

Lenovo Thinkpad T500 2056-Y4R, BIOS 6FET92WW (3.22), ECP 7VHT16WW (1.06)

General

This installation instruction describes these parts that do not or do not completely work after my OpenSUSE 12.3 DVD installation using KDE 4 as window manager. If anything does not work as expected, please have a look at the older Installation of OpenSUSE 12.1 on a ThinkPad T500 for possible workarounds that I forgot to mention here. However, almost everything seems to work fine.

Graphics

Since the default BIOS settings Switchable Graphics caused high power consumption in the past, I changed the BIOS settings from Switchable to Internal graphics before installation. Please read Switchable Graphics for the pros and cons. Note that I did not test the ATI graphics.

NOTE!

Any time you change the BIOS setting after installation, you may have to execute # mkinitrd in order to prevent loading of unnecessary modules.

Power Management

Suspend to RAM works out of the box. Note that I neither tested the default Switchable graphics BIOS setting nor Suspend to Disk.

LCD Brightness Buttons

The LCD brightness buttons do actually work, however, there is no on-screen display feedback.