Mark Alford's Red Hat 7.2 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T23

Last modified 20 Aug 2002

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

I learned a lot from Chad Remesch's T23 page.

Under RedHat 7.2 the X server freezes up sometimes, forcing a reboot. (RedHat 7.1 was even worse for this.) Neither of them is as stable and reliable as RedHat 6.2. It has been suggested that "tpctl --setup-pointing-device-internal=enable" will fix this, but I haven't tried it.

1. Installation
2. Power Management: suspension, hibernation
3. Ethernet/modem network connection
4. Getting the sound card working
5. Streaming web audio
6. TeX/LaTeX: Japanese characters, laptop presentations, search paths
7. Miscellany: system logs, HOWTO docs

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

1. Installation
   Red Hat Linux CD-ROMs are available from many sources. I have used Cheapbytes in the USA, and Cheeplinux in the U.K.

   Partitioning: make room for linux. I used Partition Magic to shrink the Windows partition down to 5GB, leaving the rest free.

   To install Linux from CD-ROM, you must first enter the BIOS setup menu (F1 at boot time) and tell it to try the CD-ROM before the hard drive.

     Startup -> Boot -> Set BIOS to boot CD-ROM before hard drive
   

   While you are at it, enable the serial port:

     Config -> serial port, toggle to enabled, it displays IO 3F8, IRQ 4
   

   Enable the beep when changing volume:

     Config -> alarm -> volume beep, toggle to enabled
   

   It will make future reinstallations much easier if you create /home and /usr/local partitions, separate from the root partition / and/or /usr. That way you can reinstall the operating system, while leaving users unmolested and keeping most the special customizations you have introduced. Just to be on the safe side, I also created /boot below the 1024th cylinder, but that probably was not necessary.

   Boot with RH7.2 CDROM in DVD drive
   English
   Generic 101 Key PC
   UK English
   Disable dead keys
   3 button mouse (PS/2)
   Install
   Custom
   Manual partition-Disk Druid, all ext3 except the swap
     mount point       size     format
     /dos        hda1  5000 M   N
     /boot       hda3    53 M   Y
     /           hda5  4000 M   Y
     /storage    hda6  3780 M   Y
     /home       hda7  2997 M   Y
     /usr/local  hda8  1499 M   Y
     swap        hda9   524 M   Y
   
   boot loader: GRUB, installed in /dev/hda MBR
   let it boot /dev/hda1 as Windows
   no boot loader password
   eth0: do not configure using DHCP, do not activate on boot
   Medium security, default rules
   
   English, Great Britain
   Europe/London, sys clock on UTC
   Add at least one user account
   MD5 and shadow paswords, no NIS, LDAP, Kerberos
   Packages: choose them. 
   For X hardware, just ask for Xconfigurator
   skip X configuration
   skip boot disk creation---cannot swap floppy drive in
   Now Linux boots OK.
   

   Get X working: download https://ranger.s3graphics.com/290-298drv/Savage_4.1.0_binary.tgz, using username and password "archive". Unpack it.

   > cp savage_drv.o /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
   > cp s3switch /usr/local/bin
   > Xconfigurator
   S3 Savage4
   Generic laptop display panel 1280x1024
   let it probe, accept 1024x768
   let it start X on reboot? no
   

   Now X works.

2. Power management
   No need to recompile the kernel. The T23 is a fine machine, but because it comes with Windows 2000 there is no FAT16 partition, so hibernation only works under Windows.

   The radical solution is to wipe out the Windows 2000 partition and put a FAT16 partition of the right size at the beginning of the disk. You can create a hibernation file in it using the stndalhd.exe utility available from IBM. Then hibernation works under linux! I have not yet tried restoring Windows 2000 to the rest of the space it used to occupy. More details are available elsewhere.

3. Networking: ethernet and modem
   Ethernet worked immediately. For the modem, get ltmodem-kv_2.4.7_10-6.00a1-1.i386.rpm and install it,

   > rpm -ivh ltmodem-kv_2.4.7_10-6.00a1-1.i386.rpm
   

   note that it sets /dev/modem --> /dev/ttyLT0. To use ppp, you will need to set pppd suid:

   > chmod u+s /usr/sbin/pppd
   

4. Sound
   

   > sndconfig
   

   it detects the card, plays a sample, which comes out too quiet, and puts appropriate lines in /etc/modules.conf

5. Real Player (streaming audio from the web)
   There is an RPM file made available by the generosity of Real Networks. If you have KDE you may find it conflicts with /usr/share/mimelnk/audio/x-wav.kdelnk from kdebase-1.1.2-33. If so, move that file out of the way, and force the install

   > mv /usr/share/mimelnk/audio/x-wav.kdelnk /usr/share/mimelnk/audio/x-wav.kdelnk.orig 
   > rpm -ivh --force rp7_linux20_libc6_i386_cs1.rpm
   

   I told the dialog box that I have a 28.8k modem.

   Now listen to something worthwhile. Try The Connection.

6. TeX tips and tricks
   Using TeX/LaTeX you can create LaTeX documents that include Japanese characters, and use LaTeX to make laptop presentations. It is helpful to set up the TeX search paths in a sensible way.

7. Miscellany
   

   HOWTO documentation

   Download it from Linux Documentation project:
   find the link for multiple pages, all howtos
   download and untar in /usr/local/doc/HOWTO/.

   Make system logs readable

   > cd /var/log; chmod +r messages
   

   On my desktop I keep a window running tail -f /var/log/messages. It is very useful, but needs to be restarted after logrotate runs.

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