Mark Alford's Fedora 7 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad 600E

Last modified 2007-Aug-8

My experiences with other thinkpads and older versions of RedHat are available here.

Executive summary

The Fedora 6 to Fedora 7 "upgrade" has broken some working code.

• Between Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7, firewire support for digital video cameras has collapsed. If this is important to you, stick with FC6.
• The Linksys PCM100 PCMCIA Ethernet card now continually emits timeout messages, but works.
• IDE hard drives are now assigned to devices /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc, muddling them up with SCSI devices like USB flash drives.

Editorial
After many painful experiences with Fedora I have adopted the ultimate defensive strategy: I have 2 hard drives for this laptop, one for everyday use and one for trying out installation of new versions of Linux. If the installation goes well then I migrate all the old data across to the new hard drive. If too many things are broken in the new version then I can return to my old setup by simply swapping the old hard drive back in.

One particularly annoying thing is that Fedora insists on a 4k stack kernel, which breaks the ndiswrapper way of using the Windows drivers for wireless cards. As I found with this Thinkpad 600E, sometimes ndiswrapper turns out to be the only option that works, even for cards that supposedly have linux drivers. Fedora's defense of this position is a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face: they regard ndiswrapper as a crutch that needs to be kicked away so that users will suffer and possibly cause vendors to release Linux drivers. That attitude to users almost makes Microsoft look benign.

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Xorg and text rendering

   The default configuration of the display was 1024x768 at 24 bit depth ("millions of colors"). This produced horribly slow and choppy updates of text in windows as one drags the window across the screen or pages down through a document. The fix is to configure the display ("system-config-display") to 16-bit depth ("thousands of colors").

2. Hard drive devices

   For many years IDE hard drives have been assigned to devices /dev/hda, /dev/hdb etc. It it ain't broke, the Fedora Project wants to fix it. Now they are assigned to /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc, muddling them up with SCSI devices like USB flash drives. In a fresh installation this transition is seamless, but the process of upgrading from FC6 is seriously complicated (see my Thinkpad T23 Fed7 notes).

3. Ethernet

   The Linksys PCM100 PCMCIA card worked flawlessly under FC6 and earlier. In Fedora 7 it continually generates timeout messages in /var/log/messages: "NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transit timed out", and regularly loses the link beat and has to autonegotiate again. The ethernet connection is usable, but something has clearly broken in Fedora 7.

4. Hibernation

   Requires a specially-created hibernation file on a FAT partition. Make sure LBA is off for this partition. See my 600E FC3 notes. Once that file exists, BIOS-driven hibernation via the Fn-F12 key works.

5. Wireless

   • Dell Truemobile 1150 PCMCIA card (Orinoco Gold)
     This used to work out of the box, but on the 600E it stopped working with all kernels after 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4. The access point is detected, iwconfig and ifconfig both give fine-looking output, but the link won't carry any ethernet traffic (e.g. you can't ping the access point: "ping 192.168.1.1" yields "Destination host unreachable").
   • TP-Link WN510G v1.1 (Atheros chipset).
     In principle there are 3 ways to get this to work in Linux: Madwifi, linuxant's driverloader, and ndiswrapper. See my FC4 notes for a full exploration. This card works with ndiswrapper as long as you use linuxant's 16k stack version of the Fed7 kernel ("devel" headers as well as binary kernel). Boot the 16k kernel, and compile and install ndiswrapper. The card then works.

6. Firewire (video capture via kino)

   If you use firewire for downloading video from your digital video camera (via kino, for example) then for your purposes the Fedora 7 kernel is broken. You will have to get a new kernel and new raw1394 modules. I would stick with FC6!

7. Sound

   I found useful information in the thinkwiki. You need to disable "QuickBoot" in the BIOS, and then you need to force it to load the correct module: by

   sbin/modprobe snd-cs4236 index=0 port=0x530 cport=0x538 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0 isapnp=0
   

   This can be accomplished via lines in /etc/modprobe.conf:

   ----
   alias snd-slot-0 snd-cs4236
   options snd-cs4236 index=0 port=0x530 cport=0x538 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0 isapnp=0
   ----
   

   Then typing modprobe snd-slot-0 should get the sound working. Typing play /usr/share/sounds/warning.wav is a convenient way to test it. Make sure volume is turned up, both on the keyboard and in the mixer (icon in bar).

8. Miscellaneous

   For information about keeping your system updated, disaster prevention, firewalling, etc, see my Linux hints page

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