IBM ThinkPad T42P [2374-HTG] + Debian GNU/Linux [sid]

Benedikt Heinen <debian-t42p@web.icemark.net>

The machine

In short - Great! Very much like the other Thinkpads I've had before - just faster and with some more features... Though, yes, one feature has been lost - the A30P had IEEE 1394 [firewire], but that's about the only smag I can find... :-(

While I was pretty happy with the Thinkpad A30P I had before, the previous machine had one big drawback: very little battery operation time - even with the additional drive bay battery it wouldn't go much beyond 90 or so minutes (which may partially be due to the full RAM upgrade - I've heard machines with less RAM would run considerably longer...

The machine in question has the following key features:

• Intel Pentium-M 745, 1.8GHz (400MHz FSB)
• 1 GB RAM
• 60GB IDE hard disk
• Ultrabay Slim IDE DVD-Recordable
• Built-in ATI FireGL Mobility T2 (with 128MB RAM)
• Built-in MiniPCI Intel Pro/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
• Built-in MiniPCI Intel Pro/Wireless LAN (802.11b)
• Built-in Bluetooth
• Built-in SoundMAX
• Built-in USB 2.0
• Built-in PCMCIA CardBus-Bridge
• Pre-Installed OS: Windows XP Professional

The installation

Wellll - I cheated - a little... Or better - I took a shortcut

1. compiled a new kernel on my A30P, adding module support for the e1000 (ethernet) and ehci-hcd (USB2)
2. disabled gdm start-up (just move /etc/rc2.d/S99gdm to /etc for the time being
3. added loading the e1000 and ehci-hcd modules to /etc/modules
4. shut down the A30P (and power it off)
5. took the primary disk out of the A30P and moved it over to the T42P (using it to replace the original primary disk)
6. switch on the T42P - and presto, the machine boots up everything you had (and even managed to restore it's LAN connection, since the e1000 driver had already been present
7. After that worked, I downloaded and installed the fglrx source package and compiled the fglrx kernel module (see below).
8. used fglrxconfig to build a new XF86Config-4
9. tried to start up X11 via startx; which worked fine, killed the X server and started up gdm again via '/etc/init.d/gdm start', and once that worked moved /etc/S99gdm back into /etc/rc2.d/

Since the original installation, I've also found and tested the Intel wireless LAN driver found at SourceForge [ipw2100]. The driver works straight out of the box...

This little cheating meant, that it took less than 1 hour to migrate from my old machine to the new one! (Good luck trying that with Windows...).

There are still a few issues I need to deal with:

1. I haven't tested the PCMCIA subsystem yet (don't have anything that I could use it with right now, since most I could need is already integrated in the machine anyway).
2. Haven't tested Bluetooth, yet. Will try that once I've settled down here once my moving to my new place is completed

Hardware compatibility

• ATI FireGl Mobility T2: [OK] DRI works out of the box with the fglrx driver.
  There is an unofficial debian apt repository for those drivers together with a short description on how to build the drivers at ATI Linux driver packages for Debian.

• Sound (intel8x0.o): [OK] works out of the box...

• USB (ehci-hcd [2.0]/uhci-hcd [1.1]): [OK] works out of the box...

• Gigabit Ethernet (e1000): [OK] Works out of the box; though I've only tested it up to 100MBit/s, since I don't have access to a Gigabit LAN yet. Though I won't doubt it working there as well...

• Wireless LAN (ipw2100 from Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Driver for linux): [OK] Compiles fine, but I don't have any Wireless LAN around here to test it. Update: Works fine, I only found that out by accident, when my notebook during bootup tried to bring up the wireless LAN and inadvertently tapped into one of my new neighbours wireless lan... ;-/ (Still haven't found out, whose WLAN it is exactly, so if you're with demon.co.uk and live in London, SW5 0PD, UK, please get in touch - it might have been yours. ;-)

• DVD-Recordable: [OK] works out of the box with cdrecord ProDVD. The drive (Matshita DVD-RAM UJ-812) does not seem to support TAO mode for writing, though, so SAO or PACKET will have to be used. I don't know enough about the different modes to be able to say whether this is much of a restriction or not, though. Also, please note, I've tried reading CDs/DVDs and blanking/writing DVD-RW. I haven't used "DVD-RAM" media yet.

• Bluetooth: [untested] I don't have any Bluetooth devices to test it with..)

problems, still unsolved (some at least)...

Any help on these would be highly appreciated! Just feel free to email me at debian-t42p@web.icemark.net If you have any more information on these...

Configs

• Kernel .config (for linux-2.6.8-rc2 - the current test kernel at the time of this writing).
• /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

Other T42p resources

• William Stein's "Debian on a T42p"