martin.wuertele.net/ Debian on IBM ThinkPad x40

hardware

overview

Working hardware

Not (yet) working or untested hardware

Installation

Partitioning

First I thought of keeping a copy of Windows but as it requires more than 6 GB, which is more than I'm willing to waste, I removed it entierly. As a sideffect the recovery partition no more works once grub is installed so I removed it as well.

Installing Debian

I installed Debian GNU/Linux using debian-installer netboot-images. Just follow the instructions provided in the installation manual, works flawless including LVM setup.

Network

The onboard Intel e1000 Gigabit Ethernet Controller works out of the box.

With the madwifi driver (use module-assistant for an easy installation) the wireless works flawless as well.

Xorg

Works out of the box.

Powermanagement

Works out of the box, don't forget to install a user space governor like powernowd or load a kernel governor.

Suspend

Use acpisleep=s3bios as boot parameter to ensure proper suspend and resume. The hibernate package with enabled switch to console before suspend works around the video wake-up problem.

Both suspend to disk and suspend to ram work fine.

Modem

I only got it to work with the Linuxant closed source driver. Haven't tried newer versions of sl-modem as I never needed it.

Sound

Just run alsaconfig and select the intel8x0 driver.

References

Part of the initial HowTo is based on Running Linux on a Thinkpad X40 by Stephan Mü.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2005-2007 by Martin Würtele, Klaus Ita, Daniel Baumann.

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