Fedora Core 7

First impressions:

   - first put the SATA (via BIOS) in compatibility mode .
     Disk is /dev/sda, DVD is /dev/scd0, a dual layer writer
     which appears to work fine.

   - this NVIDIA card is not detected in FC7 (FC9 ok, see below), 
     so had to do the slightly more tedious non-graphical install.
     After that was done, manually installed the NVIDIA driver, which then
     worked out of the box (with a small caveat, see below)

   - sounds doesn't work (known issue, can be solved by doing the ALSA
     drivers yourself
	** (17-feb-2008) finally got this to work with kernel  2.6.23.15-80.fc7 
  	   and the 1.0.16 also drivers from source (the kernel alsa didn't seem to
	   work for me)

   - wireless sometimes works, not sure when and when not. Sometimes 10b/sec,
     and i've seen 2MB/sec....
     I've tried the latest 3945 drivers from scratch. seems to be same.
     There is some suggestion that fixing the channel works better.
     New kernel (2.6.22.9-91.fc7) gave a very well working wireles after the
     first boot that then crawled to a halt and went back to the old mode.

	installed ipw3945 via FreshRPMS. Now loads this by default. Speed
	is only about 350 KB/s, but works (as eth1). Also notable is that
    	the frontpanel wireless light is now green, which iwlwifi wasn't doing.

	** with newer kernels it pretty much works out of the box, though 
	occasionally a reboot would be needed to reset the drivers as they
	sometimes get confused - ipw3945 is what i'm using with wlan0 

   - suspend to memory worked out of the box.

   - hibernation ("suspending to disk", uses swsusp) doesn't seem to work
     out of the box
	** not yet tested with the new kernel and nvidia driver ***
	** for a comparable model X61 and Ubuntu8 this worked out of the box **

   - somewhat SERIOUS: screen updates in certain programs are very slow.
     e.g. pgplot circles, OpenOffice programs, emacs scrolling

	SOLVED:  upgraded to NVIDIA-Linux-x86-100.14.19-pkg1.run, which
		 has explicit support for the FX 570M card.

   - oddities:
	suspend seems to work mostly, but sometimes it takes several
	minutes (sometimes aided by some Ctr-Alt-Fn  switching?); 
	patience seems to be the only way...

   - some applications (notably firefox, thunderbird, pidgin) crash and burn
     at random times. Not sure if that's me, or a relic of my . files

   - at random times - gimp seems to trigger it more than others - the whole
     desktop goes nuts as if doing a full refresh. Takes 10 secs or so to get
     back to live. This is VERY annoying. Also worried if that's not just
     me and my . files.

Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy)

   - booted in safe mode, and came up utilizing full (wide) screen: nice
   - partition program scrashed.... could not continue. it filed a report
	seems to be that my /home is a symlink to a separare /home
	partition, and the "Migration assistant" couldn't quite
	figure it out. Solution: do /home later after the install.

Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy)

Fedora 9

cute mystery:

# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5              9920624   7348976   2059580  79% /
tmpfs                  1020732         0   1020732   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda7            201704368 188000916   3292132  99% /home
/dev/sda1              1019208     67700    898900   8% /a1
/dev/sda2              9920624   7979356   1429200  85% /a2
/dev/sda3              9920624   7348976   2059580  79% /a3

Looks like sda5 and sda3 are the SAME!!!!???

# mount
/dev/sda5 on / type ext3 (rw)					<----
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/sda7 on /home type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /a1 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda2 on /a2 type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda3 on /a3 type ext3 (rw)					<---


]# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1         131     1052226   83  Linux
/dev/sda2             132        1406    10241437+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            1407        2681    10241437+  83  Linux			<----
/dev/sda4            2682       30401   222660900    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            2682        3956    10241406   83  Linux			<----
/dev/sda6            3957        4478     4192933+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7            4479       30401   208226466   83  Linux

did I get a RAID1 installed by default???

# more /etc/fstab
LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sda6         swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
#
/dev/sda1               /a1                     ext3    noauto        0 0
/dev/sda2               /a2                     ext3    noauto        0 0
/dev/sda3               /a3                     ext3    noauto        0 0


In the end i figured out this was the result of installing FC7 and FC8
and /boot.  Manually fixed.

Links

• ThinkWiki, lots of help for TP users.
• The linux laptop page does not have any T61 specific information yet. (sep 2007)
• IBM's "Linux for Personal Systems" (has some T61 info as well)
• thinkpad labeling
• Other installation stories:
  • Various on the thinkwiki T61 and T61p pages.
  • Marius Gedminas Ubuntu Gutsy.