Mark Alford's Fedora Core 3 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad 600E

Last modified 28 Dec 2004

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

  1. Windows, and enabling hibernation
  2. Installation
  3. Fixing the text scrolling problem in the Xorg neomagic driver.
  4. Fine-tuning: fvwm window manager with gnome, etc
  5. Dell Truemobile 1150 PCMCIA wireless ethernet card
  6. Getting the sound card working
  7. Getting pine as your mail program
  8. Keeping packages up to date: yum
  9. Precautions against future disasters
  10. TeX/LaTeX tips and tricks: Japanese characters, laptop presentations, search paths

Notation: I use '----' to mark the beginning and end of bits of text that go in files.

Linux distributions are available from many sources. For Fedora it is most convenient to get it on a single DVD.

I was installing FC3 onto a brand new 40G hard drive, because my original 600E 5G hard drive was too small. To get hibernation working, I installed Windows first, and set up the hibernation file. Installing DOS would probably have worked just as well, but I wanted a dual boot system anyway.

  1. Windows Installation and enabling hibernation

    1. Partition the virgin hard drive using the GNU partition editor, parted. You can download images for the boot and root parted floppies from the parted website. Boot off the boot floppy, and insert the root floppy when requested. Access your new drive: 
      > parted /dev/hda
      It complains that there is no "label" (partition table) on the hard drive. 
      > mklabel msdos
      Create a 5G partition for windows: 
      > mkpartfs primary fat32 0 5000
      Put an extended partition on the rest of the disk: 
      > mkpart extended 4998.164 38154.375
    2. Install Win2k on the 5G partition: boot off the Win2k CD and go through the installation procedure. Let it format the 5G C: partition as FAT32. It is important that Win2k format the partition, so it can overwrite the MBR and boot to that partition to complete the install.
    3. Enable hibernation: connect to the internet via Win2k. (I use a Linksys ethernet card, so I had to install the Windows driver from the floppy that came with the card.) Download the Thinkpad configuration utility for DOS from the IBM website (NB: the DOS version, not the Windows version.) Follow the instructions and install it. Start a DOS window, and create a hibernation file on drive C: 
      > PS2 HFILE C
      To check it worked, type DIR/AH and you should see a very large file called PM_HIBER.BIN. (SAVE2DSK.BIN is different: it is for software hibernation in Windows.) Reboot. Now you can hibernate via Fn-F12. This may not work from Win2k, but it works if you boot off a DOS floppy, and it will work under Linux.

  2. FC3 Installation

    I used Disk druid to make the usual partition structure 
    /            12G
/home        16G
/usr/local/   4G
swap         about 1G
    For the swap partition I had to specify the size, "fill to max" does not work.

  3. Fixing the Xorg neomagic driver

    The Thinkpad 600e has a neomagic video card. Unfortunately, the Fedora Core 3 X11 system is Xorg 6.8.1-12, which comes with a severely crippled neomagic driver. Anything involving scrolling of text is seriously impaired: slow and jerky, with heavy use of CPU time. Luckily the solution is simple: get the good old XFree86 driver back. Download neomagic_drv.o from the XFree86 website (or this local copy) and copy it to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/. (First make a backup copy of your original version.)

    You may also need to restrict yourself to 16bit color by modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf, setting "DefaultDepth" to 16 in the "Screen" section, and making sure there is a "Depth 16" subsection.

  4. Fine tuning

    1. Mount options

      I added the following lines to my /etc/fstab. They allow anyone to write files on the FAT32 partition /win, and anyone to mount /media/cdrom and /media/floppy and anyone to unmount them again. Flash memory sticks are mounted in /media/mem 
      ----
/dev/cdrom      /media/cdrom   udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0	/media/floppy	auto	noauto,users	0 0
/dev/hda1	/win		vfat	users,uid=99,gid=99,umask=000	0 0
/dev/sda1	/media/mem	ext3	noauto,users	0 0
----
      Note /win is vfat, not msdos: that gets the long file names. To make sure kudzu won't take the cdrom entry out if you swap out the CD drive, make sure there is no "kudzu" in the options for /dev/cdrom.

    2. fvwm window manager

      I use gnome, but I prefer to kill nautilus and replace metacity with the fvwm window manager. Fvwm is simple, it starts up instantaneously, and you can configure any keystrokes and mouse clicks you like. Step by step:
      1. Download the RPM file from the fvwm website and install it. (It needs the libstroke package too.)
      2. Replace metacity with fvwm: 
        > gnome-session-properties &
second tab, select "metacity", change value from "restart" to "normal"
click "apply"
> killall metacity; sleep 1; fvwm &
      3. Get Nautilus off the root window: 
        > gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false
        Restart the gnome session, selecting "save this session". Now you are back in control of your desktop again.

    3. local libraries

      If you want to install tarballs in /usr/local, you should add /usr/local/lib to the library load path, since some of them may install their libraries in /usr/local/lib. Create file local.conf in /etc/ld.so.conf.d, containing 
      ----
/usr/local/lib
----
      (note that this is automatically included by /etc/ld.so.conf)

  5. Dell Truemobile 1150 wireless PCMCIA card

    This card works out of the box. Configuring a wireless connection by hand is also easy. You create /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0: 
    ----
DEVICE=eth0
USERCTL=yes
ONBOOT=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NETMASK=
IPADDR=
BROADCAST=
NETWORK=
TYPE=Wireless
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
ESSID=    # supply ESSID here if you know it
CHANNEL=6
MODE=Auto
RATE=Auto
----
    If you have a WEP-encrypted wireless network, put the key in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-eth0: 
    ----
KEY=12345F678
----
    Then the command ifup eth0 will start the wireless connection and ifdown eth0 will stop it.

  6. Sound

    Sound worked immediately on installation.

  7. Pine

    Fedora Core 3 does not include the pine email program. This is unfortunate. You can download the rpm file from the pine website. Note that it requires you to install the compat-openldap-2.1.30-2.i386.rpm package.

Copyright © Mark Alford (2004)

alford(at)physics.wustl.edu

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