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Installing Mandriva 2007 on a Thinkpad X60s

written by Mickey on 2006-10-02

My recently acquired Thinkpad X60s just arrived a couple of days ago and naturally the first thing I had to do was to install my Linux-Distribution of Choice to get a nice mobile development workstation. Getting there wasn't that easy and since there are already documentations for installing other Linux Distributions, I just thought I briefly share my findings with you.

Installation Procedure:

  1. The preinstalled operating system is Windows XP. To make room for the Linux OS, you have to shrink the Windows NTFS partition. I did that using PartitionMagic 8.0 from within Windows. I shrinked the partition to be 30G which left me with 40G for Linux.
  2. Prepare a medium with an installer. If you have a docking station with an optical drive, this is easy. I didn't, hence I had to prepare a bootable USB drive. I created a FAT16 partition on the USB drive, dd'ed images/all.img from the Mandriva Installer DVD onto the partition and set it to active (bootable) using fdisk from a Linux machine.
  3. Boot from the Installer medium. On the Thinkpad X60s, you have to press F12 during boot to chose the boot drive. I did that and then the Mandriva installer started.
  4. If you -- like me -- have no docking station and no optical drive, then you need to come up with another storage source for the installation packages. I put the Mandriva Installation DVD into my Windows machine and launched the WarFTPd ftp daemon to serve it. If you have enough space on your USB drive, just copy the i586 directory over to it as well.
  5. Unfortunately the Mandriva Installation image does not recognize either the internal LAN nor the internal WLAN adapter of the Thinkpad X60s. Fortunately, I had a cheapo USB-Ethernet adapter laying around which was recognized. You won't need this if you have enough space to put the i586 directory onto your USB hard drive.
  6. The actual installation procedure went pretty straightforward. Be sure to chose manual partitioning otherwise you'll ruin your Windows installation. Partition your drive so that /dev/sda5 will contain your Linux root file system (I chose ext3fs), /dev/sda6 should contain the swap space. Sometimes the installer seems to stall for a couple of minutes, but don't be worried, it will eventually continue.
  7. If you want to preserve the special ThinkPad Bootloader, then you should choose to install the Grub Bootloader into /dev/sda5, not into the MBR (Master Boot Record).
  8. After rebooting, boot into Windows again and grab the latest version of Grub4Dos. This way you can boot Linux from the Windows (special Thinkpad version) Bootloader.

Things that didn't work out of the box:

  1. Ethernet
  2. Wireless LAN
  3. Sound
  4. SD/MMC Card Reader

Post-Installation Hints:

  1. Kernel 2.6.17 contains a bug in the e1000 driver that prevents the network card being correctly initialized when you don't have a cable w/ a working link plugged in. This can be fixed by recompiling the kernel with a patch.
  2. The ipw3945 driver needs manually installing the firmware microcode and the ipw3945 daemon. You can get both from http://www.bughost.org/ipw3945/.
  3. Install alsaconf and go through the menu-based configuration. The X60s contains the AD1981HP as part of the Intel ICH7 chipset.
  4. It's a RICOH card reader which needs the module sdhci a recent kernel (>= 2.6.17rc1). Open /etc/modprobe.preload and add this line. After rebooting (or manually modprobe'ing) the SD should be found as /dev/mmcblk0.

[to be continued]