Mark Alford's Fedora 17 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T23

Last modified 2012-Aug-02

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

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Xorg and SuperSavage graphics card

   The Fedora 17 Savage video driver is broken. At installation, you need to choose kernel option xdriver=vesa or else the install hangs with black screen before "What language..."? dialog screen.
   Once the system is installed you can get the Savage driver to work, by installing a new enough kernel and selecting driver option "DisableTile":
   1. Install the Savage driver

      yum install xorg-x11-drv-savage

   2. Make sure you have a more recent kernel, like kernel-PAE-3.4.1.1.fc17.i686.rpm (before this was included in the Fedora repositories I had to obtain it from koji.fedoraproject.org) install it, and boot it. When X starts you will get a crazy-looking screen with vertical bars and other junk.
   3. Use CTRL-ALT-F3 (or other function key) to get a usable single-user screen. Log in as root and generate an xorg.conf file:

      Xorg :1 -configure  
      # ignore Configuration Failed message
      cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
      

      Edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file: uncomment Option "DisableTile" in the Section "Device" that contains the Savage driver options.
   If you reboot, X should be working. To improve performance, enforce 16 bit depth by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding DefaultDepth 16 in every Section "Screen". To check if this worked:

   xdpyinfo | grep "of root"
   

   and it should say the root window is 16 planes deep.

2. Sound

   Pulseaudio does not seem to work on the T23. It gives jerky playback.
   Solution:

   yum remove pulseaudio
   

3. Firefox and Chrome: Flash plugin

   Starting with flash-plugin-11.2.202.228, the flash plugin supplied by Adobe has stopped working with older CPUs such as the Intel Pentium III that is present in the Thinkpad T23. This affects Firefox and later versions of Chrome.
   The reason is that the plugin was compiled with the SSE2 instruction enabled, and the Pentium III does not support that instruction. The symptom is that if you try to view a flash video, such as Adobe's flash-testing page, you will not see any video. For more information, see this bug report submitted to Adobe or this FedoraForum thread.
   Solution: use an older version of the flash plugin. Older versions are available as RPM packages at rpmfind. Alternatively, here is how to get one from Adobe's flash player archive:
   1. Download flash plugin version 11.1.102.63 (Released 2012/03/05) and extract the relevant file:

      unzip fp_11.1.102.63_archive.zip 
      cd fp_11.1.102.63_archive/11_1r102_63_32bit
      tar zxf flashplayer11_1r102_63_linux.i386.tar.gz
      

      This gives you the plugin binary libflashplayer.so (local copy available here).
   2. Install this older version, by copying that file to the places where Firefox and Chrome look for plugins:

      cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flash-plugin/  
      cp libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so
      

   3. Restart Firefox and/or Chrome and check the Adobe flash test page.

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