Debian Etch GNU/Linux on Thinkpad T40 Notebook

Installation Notes by Jim Cota

Last updated November 03 2007 Rito with Asus Z63A

Background

Shortly after successfully installing Debian Etch on my Asus Z63A, it was stolen. As a result I purchased a used IBM Thinkpad T40. Because of the large knowledge base of Linux/Thinkpad users on the net, I figured that I could easily pick up a used machine without worrying about hardware compatibility issues and spare the need for exhaustive research. With the exception of the stock Cisco Aironet 350 wireless adaptor, the installation and compatibility has been relatively flawless. The Thinkpad documentation is excellent. Although it is not as easy to upgrade the hardware as my Z63 was, the high quality and easily accessible documentation makes up for the extra work.

Since the install went so easily, I really don't have a lot to document. On this page I will highlight what seems worth mentioning from my perspective and hope that this will help another user.

back to top

Hardware Configuration

back to top

Partitions

I wanted to make sure that my data would be secure if I lost control of my notebook, so I needed to encrypt at least my home and swap partitions. I had read up on this subject before installing Debian on my Asus notebook and was planning on using these instructions at debian-administration.org.

I used the Debian Etch 4.0 Stable DVD for my installation. Debian has an excellent installation guide available at debian.org. When I began the installation process and got to setting up the partition tables, I was surprised to see a selection for setting up one encrypted LWM partition for the entire disk with the typical logical partition table within. This was not ideal, since I wanted to keep my Slackware installation and didn't want the performance hit of an encrypted root partition, but it was so simple that I decided to give it a try. One thing to watch out for is that by default a very small /tmp partition is set up, which will result in problems with applications that require saving their buffer in /tmp, such as The Gimp and GnomeBaker.

I used this encrypted LVM setup on my Asus for about a month without a perceived difference in performance. This Thinkpad is a 1.5 GHz and again, I do not perceive any lack of performance due to the encryption

back to top

Monitor Configuration

It took a little fiddling to get the correct resolution configured for the Thinkpad's monitor. By default, only 800x600 was available in the Gnome screen resolution gui. I had to modify my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file by adding the correct resolution of 1024x768 to the display subsections. I feel that I have forgotten some step here (it seems that I was not that easy).

back to top

Wireless

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the stock Aironet 350 was not practical since it did not support WPA encryption. An inexpensive and easy upgrade to an IPW2915 brought my wireless up to standard. Of course the version 3 firmware had to be downloaded from IBM's sourceforge page and the tarballs unpacked in /lib/firmware/

Tweaks

After completing the installation and booting, a few minor tweaks made the system feel more like home: add "vga=792" to the kernel parameters in /boot/grub/menu.lst and set the default run level to 3 by renaming /etc/rc2.d/S21gdm to /etc/rc2.d/K21gdm. Then, to get a clean screen to start off with, I added a symlink to the clear command: 

		#ln -s /etc/rc2.d/ /usr/bin/clear S99clear

Now I can read my Mutt mail and manually start the X server when I am ready.

I hope you find these notes useful and enjoy using GNU/Linux.

-Jim Cota

back to top

Back to GNU/Linux