Wake Forest faculty and students are issued new IBM ThinkPads on a two-year rotation. The model I have currently (as of July 2007) is the T60p.
Specs |
Linux installation |
Xorg |
Ethernet card |
Wireless card |
Audio
CD/DVD |
IBM resources
The WFU-issue Thinkpad T60p (type 8741 Y1B) comes with
I don't use a Linux "distro" -- I have a system of my own that I have fine-tuned over the years. When I get a new Thinkpad, I copy the old system to CD-ROM in the form of gzipped tarfiles. After setting up the new hard drive, I copy the system over and tweak it as needed for the new machine.
My basic strategy on this occasion was as follows:
After re-partitioning, my hard drive looks like this:
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 6267 50331648+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 6268 6397 1044225 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda3 6398 14593 65834370 83 Linux
Xorg version 7.2 supports the ATI Mobility FireGL V5250 video. Direct Rendering is supported by the proprietary ATi driver. Info is available at thinkwiki.org. As of this writing the current version of the ATi driver is 8.38.6 (June 25, 2007). I'm not crazy about the aspect ratio of the 1680x1050 screen (fine for watching movies, I suppose, but not great for serious computing), but I use an external monitor most of the time.
Problem: I've just noticed that when I exit from X (using the ATi driver) the console is blank. Bother. Will post a fix if I find one. Later: easy -- change the vesafb setup; use vga=791 in place of vga=773.
The machine features a dual pointing system: trackpoint plus "UltraNav" touchpad. If you just configure this in X as a PS/2 device the TrackPoint works fine as a three-button mouse. The Touchpad also works OK. I have this stanza in my xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Touchpad" Driver "synaptics" Option "SendCoreEvents" "true" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Protocol" "auto-dev" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "EmulateWheel" "True" EndSection
There are a couple of special keys above the left and right arrow keys, which I gather are bound to Forward and Back in Internet Explorer under Windows; there's also a "Windows" key and a "Menu" key. Using xev, I identified the corresponding keycodes as 233, 234, 115 and 117, respectively, and I put the following into my ~/.Xmodmap:
keycode 233 = Next_Virtual_Screen keycode 234 = Prev_Virtual_Screen keycode 115 = Execute keycode 117 = Menu
Then in sawfish (the window manager I use) I bound the first two keys to page between workspaces, "Execute" to log out of X, and "Menu" to call up the root menu.
The WFU T60p comes with an integrated ethernet controller, indentified via lspci as an Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller. You can drive this using the e1000 module supplied with the linux kernel.
Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC. I haven't tried this yet, but I presume it will work with the madwifi driver. The Atheros card in my previous Thinkpad R52 did.
This is "SoundMax HDA" (Intel ICH7). It works fine with the ALSA snd_hda_intel module.
I use libata for the CD drive as well as the hard drive, via the kernel boot parameter
libata.atapi_enabled=1
With this setup the CD is found at /dev/sr0.
It's worth checking from time to time for BIOS updates and so on. You can start here.
Allin Cottrell (cottrell@wfu.edu) July 17, 2007