Installing Fedora 13 on a ThinkPad T510

NOTE! This is based on the KDE 32 bit live CD version of Fedora 13. Your experience with GNOME may be different. While I this page is still very raw, i do invite t510 fedora users to edit and fill it up

Success Chart - Out of the box experience

Item		Working	Notes
Installation	Local CD/DVD install	yes
	Network Installation	unknown
	USB Installation	yes
Display	Laptop Screen (15.6" TFT display with 1920x1080(FHD) or 1600x900(HD+))	yes	However nouveau driver has issues posted in bugzilla
	VGA	yes
Power Management	Software Suspend (hibernate)	yes
	Suspend to Memory (ACPI sleep)	yes
Audio		yes
Wireless	WiFi - ThinkPad 11b/g/n Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Express Adapter II	yes	After compiling driver. see notes below
	Bluetooth	yes	It did detect my nokia e71 and i transferred some files from it.
Input	Keyboard	yes
	(TrackPoint / Touchpad combo)	yes
	Extra keys	partial	see ThinkPad Extra keys section below
	Fingerprint	no	Am still working on it. fprint seems not to recognize the device
Ports	Ethernet	yes
	Modem	unknown
	Serial	unknown
	ExpressCard_slot	unknown
	PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse	unknown	Requires dock. I do not have a doc. Maybe someone with it can test and edit this page
	Parallel	unknown
	USB	yes
	Firewire_Port	unknown
	PCMCIA/Cardbus	yes
[Multicard reader 5-in-1 (MMC, MS, MS Pro, SD, SDHC)]		yes	2GB SanDisk Ultra II SD flash card automatically detected.
2.0MP webcamera		yes	Tested with Skype. Works perfectly.
Harddisk Active Protection		no	There is now a hdapsd rpm, but it is not installed by default, and neither is the hdaps kernel module getting automatically loaded. And even after install it is not started automatically. Tried it manually (modprobe hdaps) but seems the module is not there in the kernel.
TPM (security subsystem)		unknown
Dock removal		unknown

Tested and Verified on Fedora 13

Information in this section has been tested and verified using Fedora 13.

Installation

Installation is straight forward; you can follow the generic Fedora install instructions. However as the default installation came with windows and drive was not partitioned, i had to manually resize the partitions. Using the fedora installation cd, when you reach the partition section, delete partition where windows was installed. Resize it. I gave windows a 50gb partition and the rest to fedora. Of course this means you no longer have any windows OS.

ATTENTION!

Be careful! Make sure you have make your recovery disks and Boot disk first prior to partitioning. These disks are made in windows itself. In my case i had 2 recovery DVD's and 1 boot cd. Also DO NOT delete the recovery partition or driver partition.

After the installation, grub might not show the OS selection menu which i did list as a bug. All you need to do is edit the /boot/grub.conf file and change timeout=0 to timeout=10 When you reboot and select windows of course it wont be there. You will get an error. All you need to do now is install the boot disk (NOT RECOVERY), restore your windows by selecting the recovery partition. This will reinstall windows 7 back to the original factory settings to your 50GB drive. When you reboot grub will still be there.

Updating

After updating the system, i rebooted to the new kernel. The display went blank most probably due to the experimental noveau driver. I solved it by rebooting the comp to the old kernel and installing the proprietary nvidea card drivers using this guide. Then reboot your system and all should run well. I highly recommend you use the nvidia driver as the one in fedora gives a real headache. Dont forget you need to update your system first.

Configuration

Kernel

..

Issues

• Problems booting to the latest kernel if you use noveau driver. See note above on how to solve this.

WiFi

The kernel has no support for the wifi card. lspci shows my card as 03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8192SE Wireless LAN Controller (rev 10) Installing it is very simple.

1. Download the driver from the realtek site

  In my case the driver is RTL8192SE so i selected the linux driver and downloaded it. 

2. Install the following packages to compile it

# yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel

# yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

3. Extract the tar file you downloaded.

4. Run this command $ make

5. If no errors run command # make install as root and reboot

ThinkPad Extra keys

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

Key	Function	Handled by	Event	Works	Notes
FnF2	Lock the computer	-	unknown	unknown
FnF3	Select Power Plan	-	unknown	unknown
FnF4	Put Computer to sleep/standby mode	-	unknown	unknown
FnF5	wireless	-	unknown	unknown
FnF6	Change camera/audio settings	-	unknown	unknown
FnF7	Switch Display output location	-	unknown	unknown
FnF8	Change ultranav device settings	-	unknown	unknown
FnF12	Put computer in hibernation mode	-	unknown	unknown
FnHome	brightness up	-	unknown	yes
FnEnd	brightness down	-	unknown	yes
FnPgUp	thinklight	-	unknown	yes
FnSpace	zoom	-	unknown	unknown
FnPrtSc	Have the same function as the SysRq key.	-	unknown	unknown
FnScrLk	Enable or disable the numeric keypad.	-	unknown	yes
FnPause	Have the same function as the Break key.	-	unknown	unknown
ThinkVantage	Vendor key	-	unknown	unknown
VolumeUp	Volume Up	-	unknown	yes
VolumeDown	Volume Down	-	unknown	yes
Mute	Mute	-	unknown	unknown
NextTab	Browser Next tab	-	unknown	unknown
PreviousTab	Browser Previous tab	-	unknown	unknown
Power	Power button	-	unknown	unknown
Lid	Lid button	-	unknown	unknown