Installing Fedora 11 on a ThinkPad X22

NOTE!

This is based on the pre-release version of Fedora 11, but should give a good indication of what to expect of the final release

Success Chart

This machines SMOLT profile is available here.

Item		Working	Notes
Installation	Local CD/DVD install	yes
	Network Installation	yes
	USB Installation	yes	booting from USB key, requires that you first disable booting from the internal HDD in the BIOS (known BIOS limitation on this machine). After install is completed you can re-enable booting from the internal HDD.
Display	Laptop Screen	yes	Occasional corruption may occur.
	VGA	no	currently broken.
Power Management	Software Suspend (hibernate)	no	When entering hibernation the display will get corrupted (vertical lines), and the system hangs.
	Suspend to Memory (ACPI sleep)	no	Enters suspend, but moon LED does not go on. On resume the display is corrupted (vertical lines), and the system hangs (ssh fails)
Audio		yes
Extra Buttons	Keyboard Section	partial	See ThinkPad keys section below
Ports	Ethernet	yes
	Modem	no	Requires closed-source driver
	Serial	unknown (should work)	Requires UltraBase X2
	IrDA	no	Device is detected, but does not seem to work
	PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse	unknown (should work)	Requires UltraBase X2
	Parallel	unknown (should work)	Requires UltraBase X2
	USB	yes
	PCMCIA/Cardbus	yes
	Compact Flash	unknown (should work)
Ultrabay device hotswap		partial	Eject switch causes udev event, but no default udev script to handle the event to unmount filesystems in time. ata_piix does handle the removal and insertion of ATA devices.
Dock removal		no	No udev or HAL events, starts to complain loudly (beeping) if you try to undock

Tested and Verified on Fedora 11

Information in this section has been tested and verified using Fedora 11.

Installation

Installation is straight forward; you can follow the generic Fedora install instructions.

Configuration

Kernel

It is recommended to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add hpet=force to the kernel line. This will activate HPET (High Precision Event Timer), which will allow the CPU to sleep for longer periods and save power.

X Server

Basic X server functionality should work out of the box on the ThinkPad LCD (LVDS). Occasional screen corruption can occur.

Fedora 11 uses KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) by default, and this causes problems for now with external displays. Activating mirror mode with an external VGA display has no effect on the external display (no signal). Activating extended desktop, or booting with an external VGA display attached, causes severe corruption on the ThinkPad LCD, while again the VGA display gets no signal.

In addition external displays have a bogus 0x0 resolution mode listing

On the up side, with KMS the maximum virtual display size is now 4096x4096 (max 2048x2048 without KMS), which should allow extended desktop once the issues with external display support are sorted.

Desktop Effects

Enabling 'Desktop Effects' (compiz) works, but is unusably slow.

ThinkPad keys

ThinkPad keys are handled by a mixture of the thinkpad_acpi, acpi button and acpi dock drivers.

NOTE!

Due to Xorg limitations, some keys that cause HAL events work with Xorg (ThinkPad and Fn-F7) and others do not. This is a known limitation that should be fixed with the next major Xorg (v1.7) release.

Key	Function	Handled by	Event	Works	Notes
Fn-F3	lock screen	thinkpad_acpi	HAL	yes
Fn-F4	suspend	acpi button	HAL	partial	The key event works, but suspend itself is broken
Fn-F7	videomode	-	no	no
Fn-F12	hibernate	acpi button	HAL	partial	does the same as Fn-F4 (suspend), not hibernate. Both suspend and hibernate itself are broken.
Fn-Home	brightness up	-	no	yes	changing thinkpad_acpi hotkey_mask, causes HAL events. But sysfs backlight brightness value does not change, so OSD is wrong.
Fn-End	brightness down	-	no	yes	changing thinkpad_acpi hotkey_mask, causes HAL events. But sysfs backlight brightness value does not change, so OSD is wrong.
Fn-PgUp	thinklight	-	no	yes	changing thinkpad_acpi hotkey_mask, causes HAL events. No OSD in any case.
VolumeUp	Volume Up	-	no	yes	changing thinkpad_acpi hotkey_mask, causes HAL events. But OSD is wrong
VolumeDown	Volume Down	-	no	yes	changing thinkpad_acpi hotkey_mask, causes HAL events. But OSD is wrong
Mute	Mute	-	no	yes	changing thinkpad_acpi hotkey_mask, causes HAL events and OSD. works as a on/off toggle
ThinkPad	Vendor key	thinkpad_acpi	HAL	partial	No default action, but can be associated with gnome-keybinding-properties
Power	Power button	acpi button	HAL	yes	Need to press button for ~1 second to trigger event
Lid	Lid button	acpi button	HAL	yes
Ultrabay	Ultrabay eject switch	acpi dock	udev	no	missing udev handler
undock	dock eject	-	no	no	does not cause udev or HAL events. System starts to beep when you try to undock