darkness

I got a ThinkPad T40, model 2379 (2379-D3U really) and I’m trying to stick Linux on it.

RH9 installed fine, but slowly: no DMA. Install latest kernel errata and you get DMA. DRI with the on-board Radeon Mobility 7500 seems fine too. PCMCIA didn’t work with the kernel RH9 ships; I got no insert notification when I inserted a card, no power, etc. Updated kernel seems to have fixed that. I’ll also note that I’m having no problem with sound after suspend/resume, as some people have apparently reported on T40p notebooks, at least.

There are some warnings on the Internet about not deleting the IBM recovery “partition.” On my ThinkPad, this data is actually hidden and immutable by you, the user; so fdisk freely. I deleted the XP partition and made the whole disk Linux except…

For the hibernate (suspend to disk) partition. I actually realized that I needed this after I had already installed RH9. What I ended up having to do was boot to rescue disc, resize_reiserfs (copy it from /mnt/sysimage — but make sure /mnt/sysimage isn’t mounted before continuing) on my Reiser extended root partition down about 2GiB, rewrite the partition table to include some free space at the end (a little over 1GiB), reboot (important! I think) onto the rescue disc again, then make a new primary partition type A0 from you free space. Then run tphdisk on the partition like tphdisk 1024 >/dev/hda4, probably another reboot, and hibernation should work. I did another resize_reiserfs /dev/hda4 after I was done, which expands the Reiser file system back out to the full size of the partition.

Now, if you manage to get this up and running, you may notice that you can hibernate fine from console, but in X you lock up when you resume. I grabbed XFree86-4.3.0-24 from Rawhide and applied the “DRI-RESUME” patch (link at the bottom). After doing that I could successfully come back from hibernation.

Some stuff is still broken. Closing the lid or pressing Fn+F4 (suspend) doesn’t work when a PCMCIA card is in; sometimes I get a weird combination of beeps. apm --suspend works, however. I tried the 2.4.22 kernel from Rawhide which has ACPI enabled, but it gives some nasty warnings along these lines when booting:

ACPI-0165: *** Warning: The ACPI AML in your computer contains errors, please nag the manufacturer to correct it.
ACPI-0168: *** Warning: Allowing relaxed access to fields; turn on CONFIG_ACPI_DEBUG for details.

Then I end up getting an oops in the kernel in some os_acpi_memory_write function or something like that. I’m hoping to get by with ACPI. I haven’t looked at any of the speedstep stuff yet. I don’t really know if that’s going to require ACPI or not.