gentoo on thinkpad t420?

necron · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Sep 2010 Posts: 114

has anyone had any luck running gentoo on a thinkpad t420?

I'd like to run gentoo on one of those things, but I've had issues with hardware in the past. a few of you may remember me half assedly trying to solve an issue with my wireless card...

tomk · Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 8:40 am Post subject:

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Kernel & Hardware as it's not about Gentoo itself.
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tianqingfei · n00b Joined: 11 Sep 2011 Posts: 14

You need to download xxx.ucode from internet and put it to the folder /lib/firmware
The detail ucode file name could get from dmesg info.

Note:
#dmesg > bootinfo
search bootinfo wla, you will see an error line with the ucode file name.

If the /lib/firmware did not exist, just create it.

DirtyHairy · Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 12:46 pm Post subject:

I got a new T420 a couple of months ago and am highly pleased with gentoo on it. It is a core-i7 sandybridge machine using the integrated HD graphics. Installation went like a charm and, using the a recent kernel with the current (possibly ~amd64) xf86-video-intel and mesa version, graphics is smooth, fast and stable. The other hardware in the machine works flawlessly with linux as well, including webcam, sd reader and UMTS modem (haven't checked the fingerprint sensor though). Suspend is also working fine, and powersaving works reasonably: I get about 4.5-5 hours on the standard battery (working on the machine that is). I don't have any problems with wifi either.

The only rough edges which I have encountered were:

- Very rare occasional freezes: have been gone since kernel 3.0
- Some time ago, suspend would fail if wifi was activated (killswitch off) and the interface down (this happens e.g. when you turn it off using nm-applet). This might well be resolved now, but I didn't recheck.
- Occasional resume failures when suspending directly from the desktop. Doesn't happen when suspending from another VT, so I wrote a small PM hook to switch to a VT before suspending and back to X upon resume which fixed the issue. This might also be resolved on more recent kernel versions.
- Since kernel 3.0, a power saving feature has been disabled in i915 by default. I use the kernel command line parameter "i915.i915_enable_rc6=1" to get it back.
- My harddrive has does aggressive powersaving by default, resulting in frequent (1-3 times per minute) head park cycles. "hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" disables this "feature" --- I use /etc/conf.d/hdparm to activate it on boot and PM hook to apply it after every resume.

If you want to use hdaps, you'll have to use the hdaps driver from tp_smapi. Unfortunately, the current version does not recognize the T420, so you have to patch it. I have posted the necessary patch in another thread (I can repost it if necessary).

For the record, my lspci is