Installing Ubuntu on a ThinkPad T23

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

The upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy goes fairly smoothly.

Regressions

The following features quit working after the upgrade:

• Having Caps Lock work as a second Control key works, but the Caps Lock status light toggles on and off as Control is pressed, giving the impression that Caps Lock is actually on. This is set in System: Preferences: Keyboard: Layouts: Layout Options: Ctrl Key Position. Track Ubuntu Bug #173350 for the latest updates.
• On Screen Display of special key actions quits working. The keys include the brightness and volume adjustment keys, as well as mute. bug report has been filed about this, and you can subscribe to it to follow the progress. A workaround is to boot the 2.6.22 kernel supplied with Gutsy. This is already on your system by default after an upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy. See ChangeDefaultOS for details on how to change the "default" line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and then run sudo update-grub' for the change to take effect.

Sound After Suspend

After a Suspend/Resume cycle, sound may need to be unmuted. This can automated as follows.

Open "Applications: Accessories: Text Editor" and copy/paste in the following:

# fix sound-after-resume on the ThinkPad T23.
# Make sure that "amixer" is present, which is provided by the "alsa-utils" package.
case "$1" in hibernate|suspend)
   # nothing to do
;;
thaw|resume)
   mixers="Master PCM CD"
   for mixer in $mixers ; do
     /usr/bin/amixer -q sset $mixer mute
     /usr/bin/amixer -q sset $mixer unmute
   done
;;
*)
;;
esac
exit $?

Save the file on your desktop, naming it as "sound". Then after opening "Applications: Accessories: Terminal", copy/paste in the following commands. You will be prompted for your password.

sudo cp ~/Desktop/sound /etc/pm/sleep.d/sound
sudo chmod+x !$

The first command copies the file in the proper location. The second one makes sure the script marked is as "executable". Now whenever Ubuntu resumes it should automatically run this script and unmute the volume. If for some reason it doesn't work, you can still run the script manually to unmute the volume, also using the terminal:

sh /etc/pm/sleep.d/sound

Skype Video with Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000

Skype video can be sent or received. Doing both at the same time results in regular crashes. When sending video, the small thumbnail video of what's being sent doesn't show up. These issues could be related to the hardware being at or below the minimum recommended system requirements for Skype and this webcam.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Things generally work fine, with the following notes

Power Management

Sound After Suspend

See notes for Hardy, above.

Dual Monitors

Gutsy Gibbon has a new "Screens and Graphics" preferences area. It shows a second monitor possibility. Trying a test does make both the LCD and external screen active as one big gray monitor...but only for the test. Choosing the option to accept the settings does not actually cause monitor-spanning to work, but monitor mirroring does.

CPU Frequency Scaling

CPU Frequency Scaling seems to be working automatically. To see your current speed level, activate the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Applet. Right click on the toolbar and select "add to panel". You can search for "Frequency" to find it.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Power Management

The chips in T23s have the ability to run at speeds slower than their maximum, in order to save power. To see your current speed level, activate the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Applet. Right click on the toolbar and select "add to panel". You can search for "Frequency" to find it.

You can also enable this applet to allow you manually change the speed and scaling policy. To do that, run this in a terminal: "sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets".

These instructions are also available illustrated with screenshots.

You may also need to add a couple of lines to "/etc/modules" to allow you to be able to change the processor speed and governor. The lines are:

acpi-cpufreq
cpufreq_ondemand

These will now be loaded on at boot time. To activate them immediately:

 sudo modprobe acpi-cpufreq
 sudo modprobe cpufreq_ondemand

Some technical details are explained on the SpeedStep page.

External Resources

• Bookmarks tagged with Ubuntu and T23 on del.icio.us
• Forum posts tagged with T23 on ubuntuforums.org