Installing Slackware 12.0 on a ThinkPad R61

My Thinkpad:

7742-CTO

Intel Core 2 Duo T7300

Intel 3945 ABG wireless

nVidia quadro nvs 140m

no bluetooth / card reader / camera /fingerprint scanner

80 gb hard drive

cd burner/dvd reader

Shipped with windows vista home premium.

I used the dvd version of slackware because its what i have. The instructions are the same for the cd version, just change disks when the installer tells you to. (CD and DVD will be interchanged)

For all boots, you will not need to pass any parameters.

Step 1: Go to: http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/

Download and burn the live cd. Stick it into the thinkpad and it will boot. You will need to shrink / move the recovery partition so that the start is not at the absolute beginning of the disk, and shrink / move the windows partition so that it is not at the absolute end of the disk.

You can do this with parted or any Windows partitioning tool or dos partitioning tool, ie partition magic, ranish partion manager, paragon partition manager, etc.

I linked gparted because its pretty and easy. cfdisk will crash because of the recovery partition's start if you try it on the slackware cd, but fdisk and parted will work on the slackware cd.

Step 2:

Boot off the slackware cd, type in setup , choose a Full install ( or one with kernel sources).

Step 3:

Read the following:

http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi&n=HOWTO-iwlwifi

http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=mac80211&n=HOWTO-mac80211

Now, go do them. Wired lan works fine.

If you use in kernel alsa, you'll need a newer kernel. If you don't use inkernel alsa, you'll be fine.

You can install the nvidia driver too from the nvidia website.

If you read http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Gentoo_2007.0_on_a_ThinkPad_R61#Model , you can find some useful scripts for xmodmap, etc.

I did not try suspend to disk yet.