Thomas Lockhart
Last modified 2005-11-29.
I recently purchased a Lenovo X41 laptop with the intention of running Linux. It replaces a Sony Z505LS, at least partly because the Sony batteries fail every year or two and $500US for a battery pack is just too expensive to keep paying.
I originally tried installing the new Mandriva 2005 (I've been using Mandrake for years) but it did not seem to recognize the hard drive (??!!). I also tried SuSE Desktop 9.3, but every CD I burned failed the MD5 checksum verification at the beginning of the installation process. (Note to self: try again using "cdrecord -dao -pad" since that seemed to fix trouble with one of the FC4 disks.)
So, this documents installing FC4 on an X41.
Obtain the CD ISO images from http://fedora.redhat.com
Write the ISO images to CD using the following commands:
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=8 -dao -pad -v FC4-i386-disc1.iso
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=8 -dao -pad -v FC4-i386-disc2.iso
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=8 -dao -pad -v FC4-i386-disc3.iso
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=8 -dao -pad -v FC4-i386-disc4.iso
where the options "-dao" and "-pad" were suggested by threads I found
on Google but I've lost track of
where exactly. Without those parameters I had the third disk
repeatedly fail to properly transfer to CD.
Insert the first CD, booting the machine from the CD and run the CD verification utility.
Install a workstation
system using the default disk
configuration. Note that using the default configuration but dropping
into the customization routine seemed to cause trouble later (a python
code exception which killed the installation after I'd spent a bit of
time selecting packages). Hmm, I see that others have run into the
same trouble, so maybe the fact that I ran the installation twice
fixed the problem, not in choosing default configurations.
Add more packages after basic installation by running /usr/bin/system-config-packages. Note that I added over 300 RPMs and the process involved a lot of CD swapping. Not very polished but you get through it eventually.
Video and ethernet seems to work. Stick pointer works, as does audio. APCI should work but I have not yet tested it; perhaps adding some IBM kernel patches will be required.
The wireless network interface does not show up and is not configurable. The ipw2200 driver is loaded, but dmesg shows error messages about not finding firmware when the driver loads. See the next section for details on fixing this.
Retrieve the firmware from the SourceForge site where Intel is sponsoring a driver project for this chipset at http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net
You can also pick up small RPMs of drivers or firmware from http://www.atrpm.net.
Install the firmware into /lib/firmware, unload the kernel module,
then reload the kernel module:
rmmod ipw2200
modprobe ipw2200
and dmesg should now show some messages from the driver indicating that
firmware was loaded.
The yum rpm manager is a joy to use. The configuration available at
www.fedorafaq.org seems to make most packages available. Install the
configuration using the following command:
rpm -Uvh http://www.fedorafaq.org/yum
which installs or updates the RPM package yum-fedorafaq.
From there on you can stay current by asking yum to update packages:
yum update
which checks several repositories for package updates.
The fingerprint reader does not have a Linux driver available.
The SD card reader does not have a Linux driver available. It uses a dedicated chipset which is not on the USB bus.
ACPI power management is apparently better supported in the 2.6.15
kernel. I have not yet tried something higher than 2.6.14.
/usr/sbin/hibernate is not installed on my system even though the ACPI
configuration files in /etc/acpi/events/ mention it. Install the IBM
ACPI support module:
modprobe ibm_acpi
where ibm_acpi is built as a module for FC4 kernels.
Enlightenment does not seem to be available for FC4. I'm interested in having multiple virtual desktop panes and moving between them by edge flipping the cursor. The brightside application (available as an RPM) does provide this edge flipping and can be started automatically by adding it to the application bar in Gnome.
Copyright (C) 2005 Thomas Lockhart. Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.