Ubuntu (Warty 4.10) on Thinkpad X24 (Installation notes)

1. Connect the USB CD drive to the laptop
2. Pop in the warty warthog CD
3. Boot and keep pressing Enter
4. Reboot and wait for a while

The OS is now installed :)

Some tweaks to get everything rockin

- Edit '/etc/X11/XF86Config-4' and change Default Depth to 16 (in the section "Screen") to get the ATI Radeon 7000 going (check using glxgears ~ 400 plus fps)
- Install the package 'radeontool' from debian repos and replace '/etc/acpi/lid.sh' with this (stolen from here). Suspend/resume should now work like a charm. Battery drain rate however remains high and empties in about ~36-48 hours unless the radeonfb patch is used.
- My custom IBM a/b/g mini PCI has a broadcom chip which works very nicely with ndiswrapper
- Sometimes the sound is muted upon resume. Run this script to turn it on or better execute it via lid.sh
- The startup errors 'FATAL: Error inserting pciehp/shpchp/hw_random' are harmless and can be removed by appending the names to the file /etc/hotplug/blacklist

Other tweaks
- Add the noatime option in /etc/fstab
- Disable unnecessary logging (here's my syslog.conf)
- Disable unnecessary services (my rcS.d, rc2.d contents)
- Change the swappiness to 10 or 20
- Install tpb
- Install deborphan and run 'deborphan --guess-all | sudo xargs apt-get -y --purge remove'

Mandatory screenshots

So afaik everything works on this machine. I have had uptimes upto 20 days on this baby :)


Update [03-2006]:

After more than a year on warty I upgraded to Dapper (Flight 6) and everything including suspend and thinkpad specific keys work by default (radeontool is already installed; simply tweak /etc/lid.sh to get things going, disable 'splash' from the boot options in grub.conf and change the 'Default Depth' in xorg.conf to 16). But Dapper felt too dumbed down and for some reason didnt appear as snappy as warty so I have finally moved to debian testing (etch) which works like a charm.

Some notes for installing Debian etch...

-Go ahead with the default desktop/laptop installation (use the vga=771 parameter as the boot option)
-Change the 'Default Depth' in xorg.conf to 16
-Install laptop-mode-tools, hdparm, tpb and radeontool (see below)
-Tweak /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf to enable disk spin up/down (The default 5secs is probably too harsh so change it to 180secs and disable HD power management as the 'B 1' parameter in hdparm seems to override the 120sec idle time for my Hitachi Travelstar. See laptop-mode-tool faq for more)
-Replace the /etc/acpi/act*/lm_lid.sh with this
-Suspend/resume and disk spin up/down should now work like a charm. X22 users might find that their system occasionally fails to resume when 'dri' is enabled in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. To fix this use the radeonfb patch and recompile the kernel. This will also fix the high battery drain rate issue during ACPI suspend on X22/X24's and should give you ~300mWh with eth wake-on-lan disabled which translates to ~6-7 days of sleep time after a full charge. Please note that the patch is included in recent (2.6.18 and later) kernels. Simply rebuild the initrd with radeonfb and pass video=radeonfb:force_sleep as the kernel option during bootup. If you are compiling your own kernel then you can also add your model in drivers/video/aty/radeon_pm.c).
-The base installation is complete !

Misc. stuff...

-Install the latest firefox/thunderbird in /opt (Dont forget the symlinks in /usr/local/bin and the libstdc++5 package)
-Use deborphan to clean up any unused packages
-Use localepurge to freeup some space
-Install Intel compilers/MKL as shown here
-Install vim, mplayer, w32codecs, mozilla plugins, skype, acrobat, abiword, gnumeric etc. and you should be all set.

Screenshot (JWM; I've given up on Gnome and now run a minimalist base install with xorg, JWM, xfe (file manager), conky and a few small apps (Vim, Abiword, Gnumeric, Gimp etc.). There are no login managers, no useless eye candy, no distractions, no nothing)

Thinkpad X series + Linux >> Power/Macbooks + the massively bloated OS X (with its spinning beach ball of impending doom)

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