Mark Alford's Fedora 9 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T23

Last modified 2010-May-31

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

Executive summary

Firewire card with >ALi M5253 chipset (for video capture via kino) still doesn't work. Firefox 3 crippled by bad choice of default settings.

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Xorg and SuperSavage graphics card

   This did not work with vanilla F9. It was necessary to update with

   yum update xorg-x11-drv-savage-2.2.0-2.fc9
   

   The default configuration of the display was 1024x768 at 24 bit depth ("millions of colors"). This led to slow playback in mplayer and xine. The fix is to configure the display ("system-config-display") to 16-bit depth ("thousands of colors").

2. Main hard drive

   Works fine.

3. Second hard drive

   I have a hard drive caddy for my Ultrabay, so I can put in a second laptop hard drive instead of a DVD reader. This is great, except that if there's a live GNU/Linux installation on the second hard drive with the same partition labels then grub goes insane and tries to boot it. One solution is to relabel the partitions on the second hard drive (e2label /dev/sdbX newlabel).

4. BIOS Hibernation

   Requires kernel option acpi=off (add this to the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.conf) and a specially-created hibernation file on a FAT partition. See my T23 FC2 notes. Once that file exists, BIOS-driven hibernation via the Fn-F12 key works.

5. Wireless

   • Dell Truemobile 1150 PCMCIA card (Orinoco Gold)
     Works out of the box.
   • TP-Link WN510G v1.1 (Atheros chipset).
     See my 600E FC4 notes for a full exploration. You will need a special 16k stack version of the kernel.

6. Firewire (video capture via kino)

   If you use Firewire cards with the ALi M5253 chipset for downloading video from your digital video camera (via kino, for example) then for your purposes the Fedora 9 firewire kernel modules are broken. You will have to get the raw1394 modules.

   Add the atrpms repo to your yum config. Make sure /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo is set up correctly, in particular

   ----
   baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
   ----
   

   (NOT "fc$releasever" as in older versions). Make sure you have the most recent kernel, since atrpms packages seem to depend on that. Then

   rpm --nodeps -e libraw1394
   yum --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo=atrpms install ieee1394 libraw1394
   

   Edit /etc/modprobe.conf, and add

   ----
   blacklist firewire-ohci
   blacklist firewire_core
   ----
   

   Reboot, then plug in your video camera via firewire. The camera should be detected, and the device /dev/raw1394 created. If the device doesn't exist, create it manually by loading the modules (as root):

   modprobe raw1394
   modprobe dv1394
   

   If /dev/raw1394 is not universally readable and writeable, make it so:

   chmod a+rwx /dev/raw1394
   

   Then any user should be able to capture video from their camera via kino. See this fedoraforum thread for more details.

7. Sound

   Sound typically stops working after hibernation. This is fixed by running system-config-soundcard, moving the volume slider, and clicking on "test sound". Sometimes just typing alsaunmute works.

8. Miscellaneous

   1. Time and suspend

      Whenever I resumed from suspend/hibernate, the system time was reset to the hardware clock's UTC time! So in /etc/sysconfig/apmd, comment out the line

      ----
      # CLOCK_SYNC="yes"
      ----
      

      and do /etc/rc.d/init.d/apmd restart

   2. Fedora 9 ls bug ("Unknown colorls variable `ca'")

      cp /etc/DIR_COLORS $HOME/.dir_colors
       

      Then edit $HOME/.dir_colors and comment out "CAPABILITY" line. See this posting for more info.

   3. Firefox slow, causing excessive harddrive activity

      This is because of an inefficiently implemented database of trusted sites. The solution is to disable it:
      edit -> preferences -> security; uncheck both of the "Tell me if the site I'm visiting...." options.

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