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IBM Laptop

Thinkpad R51-2887AVG, Mandriva 2006 Powerpack

(RAM upgraded to 1.3G, and faster HD)

Reporter: Morgano

Install Went perfect. Dual Booting with MSWinXP on other partition.

What does not work

  1. Modem; during start i see message "module slamr not found" when it tries to load it into kernel (or whatever it said) I do not care for now.
  2. Suspend to RAM does not work; When it wakes up the display still show black with the last line it had when stopping: "Stopping tasks ===========." Simply no screen. And no output on VGA. Ctrl-Alt-F1 etc no response. Fron a tip on forum I tried editing xorg.conf adding the line Option "VBERestore" "true" under the "Device" sections, but no result.
Hibernate to disk Works perfect, going down on timer, or lid close, coming up where I was. One issue is if more than one user is logged in, if the non active times out it make the system go hibernating although the other user is actively using the computer...

CPU Powersaving works.

Wireless: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG Initially i used DHCP and no encryption. It just worked immediately :)

  • Activating encryption (after changing settings in the wireless router) needed several tries. Using WPA TKIP Shared key.
  • The system seemed to be schizzofrenic about wether it use eth0 or eth1 for wireless, and I am too… But now it seem to have decided on eth0.
  • IP adress maniac. There seem to be too many places for a newbie to edit to make it NOT use DHCP, I want to have it at known IP. Occasoinally I can not even ping anything except itself. After pinging it from another computer one time it responded first sluggishly, then magically was all OK and everything working. The router said the wireless client had a number in the DHCP pool, so i pinged that unsucessfully from the laptop itself, then pinged the IP i set manually and then it works again… Probably a screw loose or something...

ThinkPad R40 - 2006

Works OK. There is some "fidling" with the LAN and WiFi but it works

Lenovo/IBM X41 - 2006 (installation 11/05, updated 12/05)

For a detailed description of the configuration of this laptop, please see the thinkpad wiki. The most unusual component is the SATA hard drive, which causes some problems with installation and ACPI/suspend.

Installation Installation was complicated by the fact the 2.6.12 kernel cannot similtaneously mount ide and sata drives in udma mode (for more information, please see the thinkpad wiki). I burned the all.img to a usb jump drive (dd if=all.img of=/dev/sda1) and used this to install over the network.

Suspend to Disk Mandriva uses the script /usr/bin/pmsuspend2 as a front end to swsusp (the version built in to the stock kernel). To make pmsuspend2 work properly, it was necessary to rebuild the kernel with the requisit SATA/SCSI drivers built in. If you use the stock kernel, it is also important that you apply the sata kernel patch described here I did this with the M2006 kernel source, and suspend to disk worked intermittantly. I repeated these steps with the multimedia kernel source 2.6.12-13 in cooker. The SATA patch was already included in the multimedia kernel but the configuration file required modifications to ensure that SATA is built in (see my kernel configuration in the file config_kernel_X41 attached below). With this kernel pmsuspend2 has worked reliably for several days. Note that "pmsuspend2 memory" still fails. Following a suspend to memory, the machine reboots, but the display does not light, even if I suspend from the console. This may be fixed by adding the acpi_sleep=s3_bios to lilo.conf as described here.

I am not sure, but I imagine that this fix for pmsuspend will work for any IBM/Lenovo laptop using a SATA hard drive, including.

  • ThinkPad T43, T43p
  • ThinkPad R52
  • ThinkPad X41, X41 Tablet
Power Management Power management works out of the box on the X41 with M2006 and the default kernel configuration. I prefer to use powernowd which controls the cpu frequncy using the userspace interface. To install this:
  1. urpmi powernowd
  2. add the line "speedstep-centrino" (without quotes) to /etc/modprobe.preload
  3. be sure to enable powernowd to start on boot in the services section of drakconf.
You may fine tune powernowd by changing the settings in /etc/sysconfig/powernowd. On-demand control of the cpu frequency may also be accomplished by the kernel modules cpufreq_conservative or cpufreq_ondemand. I found that the former tends to lock into one frequency, while the latter works well.

If you use my kernel config, you will have to preload some of the cpufreq and speedstep modules. You can enable all three options (userspace, ondemand or conservative control) as well as the ability to select the lowest (powersave) and highest (performance) frequency by also adding the following modules to /etc/modprobe.preload: cpufreq_conservative, cpufreq_powersave, cpufreq_performance, and cpufreq_ondemand. If you use only powernowd, then only speedstep-centrino is needed. You can use klaptop (start the daemon with the command klaptop_check, and look for the icon in the kde panel) to select which is used.

Wireless The X41 uses one of the following wireless adapters

  • Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Mini-PCI Adapter
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Mini-PCI Adapter
I have the former on my laptop. It uses the ipw2200 module which is built along with the kernel. You must also install the firmware. For club members, just urpmi ipw2200-firmware. You may also obtain the firmware and more information about this module at sourceforge, or the firmware at Thac's RPMS.

Battery Maintenance One additional advantage of recent (mm) kernels is the inclusion of the tp_smapi module which allows you to easily control the charging profile of your battery. Lithium-ion batteries, such as those used in the X41, should never be fully discharged, and charging when (nearly) full should also be avoided (please see the thinkpad wiki for more information). To use this module, modprobe tp_smapi, and then use userspace controls to set the battery thresholds. I have attached a simple bash script, battery_limits, which does this.

Modem Due to a bug in hardrake, the modem driver is not installed correctly. Apparently, this problem can be fixed by following these instructions (I have not tested this, but the slamr errors on boot are now gone).

Other Hardware The video with glx acceleration, sound, cat 5 ethernet, usb all were installed and worked well without additional intervention. I have not tested the IrDA, SD card reader or bluetooth, and my X41 does not have a fingerprint reader.

Bibliography For more information, please see:

  1. http://demod.foosel.net/linux/thinkpad_x41
  2. http://stefan.desire.ch/howto/x41debian/
  3. http://www.net-track.ch/opensource/articles/x41.php
  4. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X41

IBM A31p with 1gb RAM and 1600x1200 display

Reporter: Polo

Both 10.1 and 2006 installed flawlessly on this machine with no hiccups. Most everything works though I haven't tried the modem and don't believe the hardware shortcut buttons to the left of the keyboard are supported. Had a little challenge getting WiFi networking working but solved the last little thing last night with the help of the software forum moderator. Am currently experiencing some sound problems, especially with Skype, but they could be either Skype or KDE related.

IBM T43P (and T43 and T42 and T42P)

Reporter: AllMax

Any T42/43/P laptop appears to have hard lock problems with the Mandriva 2006.0 stock kernel. Using urpmi from contrib to install kernel-multimedia and boot from that seems to solve the problem. Upgrading to the ATI driver from the ATI website didn't help. Neither did upgrading to 2006.0.1. This kernel-multimedia also seems to alleviate similar lockup problems with IBM M52 desktops.

 
Attachments: 2 Attachments by ProfM ...
 
 

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KB.HardwareIndex > KB. HardwareHmlf_ibm en Last Author: AllMax  Date: 2006/02/08 22:37
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