Installing RedHat 7.3 on Thinkpad X30

Introduction

For 3 years now, I have had a DELL Latitude CPt. It was getting old and falling apart and thus I decided to buy a new laptop ... obviously with the intention of running Linux on it. Thus my criteria were a light, small, solid and Linux compatible laptop. It seemed to me that the Thinkpad X30 fitted best the bill in this class. The hardware characteristics are OK for the size of the machine : 1.2 GH Mobile-PIII, 40Gb disk, 512 Mb memory. After 2 weeks, out of which one was on the road I must say that this is a lovely little machine. I happy to have been able to buy hardware from a company which has a positive attitude toward Linux !

There are a few extra details on this machine which are just lovely. The little light on the top of the screen is the little extra details which will get you carried away. Really in the design of this machine is perfect, even the smallest details have been thought through.

I have made very early on the choice of the CompactFlash card as my removable storage device. The X30 has a small CF card slot and that is another of these very nice details. I bough with the machine a 521Mb CF card as a backup medium for my work while I am on the road. I am always afraid that the computer might fall and that I loose what I have been doing ! Having the PCMCIA adapter also solved elegantly the issue of exchanging data with colleagues. It is certainly more flexible than the USB stick. With the X30 you can keep the CF card in the machine all the time without taking up a PCMCIA slot (there is only one on the machine) and copy regularly the data over.

The other peripherals I have bough with the machine are the floppy reader (have not used it yet !), the CD-RW drive which can be connected to the USB port, the extended life external batteries and a USB mouse. I have not yet gotten used to the track point of IBM and I am very happy to have the small USB mouse.

In the following I will detail my installation of Linux on this lovely Little machine. It is as much to inform others about my experience as to keep track of what I have done. So there might be details in here which are trivial for Linux gurus.

Installing RH7.3 from CDs

Before starting the install, the Windows-XP partition was shrunk to 5 Gb using Magic-Partition. I did not preserve my Windows installation on my previous machine and I have regretted it on some occasions. It is useful to have it to check that the hardware is working, get the characteristics of the hardware and be able to obtain service when the retailer is stubborn and refuses to touch a Linux machine !

The installation was easy. It just went as smoothly as it could. This was done with the CD-RW drive. I have chosen GRUB as the bootloader. It has served me well over the years.

During the RedHat install process I have chosen the Workstation configuration and used the DHCP protocol for the Ethernet interface. This hardware was also recognized without any problems. It is a eth0: Intel Corp. 82801CAM (ICH3) PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller. The USB interface is perfectly controlled by the usb-uhci driver.

The update was then done with the rpm-update tool. It was the first time I used it and I must say that it is very good. It works very well and gives to the rpm world some of the feature found in Debian. I am fed-up with the way RedHad is pushing their commercial support for the system and thus I am happy to have found a workable alternative.

The little problem which remains is that Kudzu wants to un-install the USB mouse when it is not plugged in. There must be a way to tell it that it is OK and that it should not interrupt the boot process for that !

Disk Partition

Windows XP ()
The Windows XP partition
Thinkpad documentation (VFAT, 2GB)
I decided to keep this documentation in the hope that it is in HTML and thus accessible directly from Linux. But such is not the case, it is all windows specific files. Perhaps I will find a way to do something with these 2G of data.
Swap
1.2 GB
boot
0.4 GB, This allows to have more than one kernel to boot from.
/
8.0 GB, I want to have enough space to have a large /usr/local and it is awful when programs crash because they have no space left on /tmp anymore !
/home
the rest : 21GB : that should be enough !

The kernel

The RH 7.3 with the updates leaves you a 2.4.18 kernel on the system. The few things I did with it seem to indicate that it is OK for the hardware of the X30 but I chose to upgrade with my own compilation of the 2.4.20 version. I know that I will want to add some modules for exotic hardware and be able to upgrade easily. Thus it is convenient to have the source and it's compiled version on the machine. With the disk space which was set aside it is not much of a problem anymore.

For the configuration of the 2.4.20 I used the configuration file you will find in the source RPM from RedHat. That works without any problems if you do not forget to compile and install the modules of the kernel :-).

Video Card

The video card is an Intel 82830M (alias I830). It has 48MB of memory, according to WindowsXP !

In the description of the installation of Linux on the X30 that is at http://www.fartytowels.org/x30/laptop_install.html it is pointed out that some extra support has been put for the i830 in the latest versions of the XFree86 server. Thus I decided to reinstall directly from the binary distribution of XFree86 4.3.0. This was not the most trivial experience. But we have known for years that the video card on laptops is always the hardest part of the install :-)

As the libgilde2 does not exist the standard "XFree86 -configure" command does not work. The fall back was the xf86cfg command which is not simple to use.

One of the challenges I faced was to make sure that both mice were recognized and usable, i.e. the track point and the external USB mouse. Thus I had to combine various versions of the configurations files I had generated with the config tool. In any case here is what I use now for XF86Config-4.

The USB mouse can be plugged in but the X server needs to be restarted before it will work fine.

The standard XFree86 install will overwrite what RH 7.3 has given you for the login window. Thus you have to replace xdm by gdm by hand. Now when doing software updates I need to be careful as I have not yet told rpm-update that all the XFree86 packages are not in use any more. The same applies for the kernel as well !

There are two problems I have encountered with the XFree server and which need to be solved.

Sound

One of the nice things about the X30 when I compare it to the DELL, is that you can switch off the sound for good with the "mute" button above the keyboard. It is a hardware controlled mute so that it stays even when you reboot the machine. With the DELL I had the problem that I could not stop it from making sounds when I either plugged in the PCMCIA card or put it into suspend mode ... very embarrassing when it happens in a meeting!

It is a SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio which is supported by the i810 module and it requires the A97_codec. All these modules are loaded on boot if the following lines are included in the /etc/module.conf file :

options ac97_codec
options sound
alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio

The gnome mixer will not recognize the sound card but it will work properly. When you test it, do not forget to increase the volume with the buttons above the keyboard :-)

Modem

The laptop includes an Agere Systems AC'97 Winmodem which is not explicitly supported by Linux. But still, if you use the linmodem made for the SmartLink chips you will be lucky (I used version 2.7.10 of the software provided by SmartLink).

You will find more details on this modem and how to install the software at : http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/resources.html#GCC3

The fact that IBM included a winmodem in the X30 was an unpleasant surprise to me. They could really have made the extra effort of a normal modem to ensure that all operating systems can run on this hardware !

USB mouse

As indicated above for the XFree86 server no particular problems. In the XF86Config-4 file just make sure you have the following information :

Section "ServerLayout"
...
InputDevice "Mouse1" "SendCoreEvents"
...
EndSection <\code>

and

Section "Xinput"
SubSection "Mouse"
DeviceName "USB Mice"
Protocol "IMPS/2"
Port "/dev/input/mice"
AlwaysCore
EndSubSection
EndSection <\code>

The CF card reader

This was straight forward. The card is on device /dev/hde1 and with a simple automount command you can have it mounted automatically on demand.

So that all users can access it I have put the following line in the corresponding automount file.

cf -fstype=vfat,user,noexec,dev,rw,umask=000 :/dev/hde1

The master file specifies a timeout of 10 seconds for these mounts so that you do not have to wait too long before the device is unmounted and you can take it out safely.

Installing the Nokia D211

This is the little extra which I have bought for this laptop and will hopefully allow me to work on my e-mail and other things while I sit in meetings !

It is not yet installed under Linux but as Nokia provides a kernel module I am not too worried. It simply requires you to register on their web site with the hardware ID.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all those who have contributed information to Tuxmobil and other web pages. Without these hints I would have not gone very far !
Jan Polcher
Last modified: Wed Apr 2 12:06:25 CEST 2003