IBM Thinkpad T40p

Mountain Man · Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2003 6:37 am Post subject: IBM Thinkpad T40p

I'm currently considering purchasing an IBM Thinkpad T40p for university. Will it support gentoo?

It has:

Pentium-M 1.6 Ghz
ATI FireGL 9000 64mb
512 mb Ram
IBM 802.11a/b Wireless Combo (Mini-PCI)

I'm aware of the problems that some people have had trying to repartion the disk on this machine (I want to keep XP too), so I'm thinking about buying the UltraBay Slim 2nd HDD adapter so that I can add an extra HD just for Gentoo.

Has anyone had any experience installing Gentoo on a T40 or a T40p?
Has anyone used the above mentioned adapter?
Are there any other alternatives that I could use to install Gentoo and keep XP without repartioning my main drive? (i.e. VMWare Workstation 4.0)

Thanks
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Mountain Man,
The Moving Mountain

tagswitch · n00b Joined: 19 Jul 2003 Posts: 31

Hi,

I installed gentoo in several IBM X.31 thinkpads (quite similar to T.40), and it's perfectly possible. I can dual boot with XP with no problems.

There are some issues you should take into account:

* Read a lot before installing (e.g. linux on thinkpads mailing lists, reports on linux on laptops, etc). IBM recovery tools may be hidden or in a partition of you disk. Unless you explictly ask for them, IBM does not ship recovery CDs.
http://www.linux-laptop.net/ibm.html

* If you want to resize your windows partition, it is possible to do that in FAT32 with parted *before* windows boots for the first time (it converts to NTFS). Otherwise you can always use ntfsresize or partition magic.

* You'll need a recent kernel, preferably with ac patches (agpgart, centrino/pentium M enhanced speedstep support, etc.), but it's quite easy.
(emerge ac-sources)

* Your model may be different, but these thinkpads often include a Lucent/Agere AMR modem (there are some currently available linksys drivers, binary-only, but there are some problems with the sond card... I don't use the modem though).

* The IBM a/b dual band wifi card uses an Atheros 5211 chipset, and there are working drivers for this chipset at http://www.sf.net/projects/madwifi. but:
- there is a module ath_hal (hardware abstraction library) that is shipped binary only. FCC regulations (end users must not be able to program the tx to arbitrary freqs/powers) seem to be a showstopper for open source drivers for a/b/g cards..
- existing drivers do not work for IBM thinkpads due to a bug. The authors are aware of this and they're working on a fix. It should be available in a week or two.

* The Ethernet card works perfectly with e100.o or e1000.o (depending on your model)

for further info, read the aforementioned T.40 install reports

Hope this helps,

regards,

R.

ciaranm · Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2003 11:06 pm Post subject: Yup

I've got gentoo running on a T30 quite happily. Feel free to drop me an email if you run into difficulties...

procrustes · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2002 Posts: 13

The madwifi drivers work very well now. You can grab the cvs from sourceforge if you want, but the version available in portage (0.1_pre20030802) works just fine for me.

amoc · Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2003 5:14 pm Post subject:

Regarding the recovery/hidden prtition, is it possible to use "dd" to wipe the MBR and partition table?

ultraslacker · Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2003 2:41 pm Post subject:

You can free up the encrypted partition through the bios, so you don't need to use dd.

r3 · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2003 Posts: 10

I install the gentoo linux on my T40 laptop, but the "halt" command doesn't work if you using a kernel lower then 2.6, It just hangs there, further more, once you press the "Fn" key, the computer will hangs as well ,hope someone can fix it for me

mkershaw · n00b Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 41 Location: Dirty Jersey

mkershaw · n00b Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 41 Location: Dirty Jersey

well it seems like i've got the "Fn" key issue resolved now that test7 is out. I still cannot get my internal wifi working though... never set it up before so have no clue what i'm doing. can anyone maybe give me a hand?? or maybe guide me to a good How-To? i've been looking forever and just can't seem to come across a decent one. btw..i'm on a T40

osterhas · n00b Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 11

i have seen several t40p running redhat 7.3 with kernel 2.4.21. i think the problem will be the wireless driver. i think they're still in beta state.

peace

Gonneman · n00b Joined: 10 Dec 2003 Posts: 23

Whenever I try to connect with my atheos wireless card I get the error:
association failed (reason 128) or association failed (reason 136) . Does anyone know what that means and how I can fix it? I'm using the latest madwifi-drivers and the 2.4.23 vanilla kernel.

NiXZe · Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 7:04 pm Post subject:

i'm using a T40p and everything works perfectly... (to my liking anyway)
kernel: 2.6.1-rc1 (development-sources)
wlan: ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge madwifi-driver
xfree: use drm and see my kernel config

to delete the ibm predesktop area use their utility (found link in their service manual)

as of dual boot i don't know (hate XP) will install w2k soon tho

for some of my files check out http://www.usdata.cjb.net/~NiXZe/T40p/

if there is any other files you want send me a pm!
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Stu L Tissimus · Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 7:55 pm Post subject:

Hmmm... I'm thinking of getting me a new ThinkPad too. Currently stuck on my dad's old 600X. It's been great to me, seeing as it's been all over the world since '98... But now it's starting to break apart... The case will come off soon (My mom dropped it on a hard floor

), and I have an annoying BIOS bug where it takes about 3 mins to get to GRUB, and the built in mouse doesn't work because of this bug.

But hey, for a six year old laptop, this thing has been reeeaaallly nice.
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Gonneman · n00b Joined: 10 Dec 2003 Posts: 23

Thx for the hint. Managed to find out what was wrong though. The mtu for ath0 was set a bit too high(1500) for the amount of traffic that was wizzing around, so none of the dhcp packages managed to get back to me. Wireless now works fine if I set mtu to 768.