Mark Alford's Fedora 7 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T42

Last modified 2007-Dec-20

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

Executive summary

• Between Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7, firewire support has been upgraded, causing it not to work. If you use a firewire connection to a digital video camera, stick with FC6.
• IDE hard drives are now assigned to devices /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc, muddling them up with SCSI devices like USB flash drives.

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Main hard drive

   Installation of Linux alongside pre-existing WinXP:

   1. Boot WinXP, defragment hard drive, which is one big NTFS partition called IBM_PRELOAD: (Control panel -> admin tools -> computer management -> disk defragmenter)
   2. Boot off gparted livecd. It automatically starts its disk utility. We see IBM_PRELOAD and the hidden FAT32 rescue partition.
   3. Highlight (click on) IBM_PRELOAD then click on "resize" New size 12000 MiB (say), click cursor in "free space following" box to update it, then click "Resize/Move" then click "Apply".
   4. Highlight unused space, click on "new", for "Create as" select "Extended partition". Leave it as 0 MiB before and 0 MiB after, Click "add" It leaves 6MiB unallocated after the extended partition, no big deal.
   5. Reboot into WinXP. It does a disk check, and then once the screen comes up it wants to reboot, so let it do that. Then put in the F7 DVD and reboot to install Linux in the extended partition you just created. You'll want the custom disk layout option.

   Fedora now assigns hard drives to devices /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc, muddling them up with SCSI devices like USB flash drives. Can cause problems when upgrading from FC6 (see T23 page).

2. Hibernation

   Out of the box, you can do a software hibernate via the Gnome panel (System->shutdown->hibernate). This uses the swap partition. If you install the acpid package then Fn-F12 invokes this automatically.

3. Wireless

   Onboard Atheros chipset.
   Download madwifi-0.9.3.1.tar.gz from madwifi.org. Untar it and

   cd madwifi-0.9.3.1/
   cd scripts/
     ./madwifi-unload.bash
     ./find-madwifi-modules.sh `uname -r`
   cd ..
   make
   make install
   modprobe ath_pci
   

   Now, iwconfig should show the ath0 and wifi0 devices. Add to /etc/modprobe.conf:

     alias ath0 ath_pci
   

   The wireless module dies after resume from hibernation. You have to reload the module as root:

   rmmod ath_pci
   modprobe ath_pci
   

   There must be some script that can be told to do this automatically, but I don't know where it is.

4. 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. See T23 page.

5. Sound

   No problems.

6. Miscellaneous

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

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Roger Alford