Installing SuSE 10.0 on Thinkpad T40p

ATTENTION!

This is work in progress. Do not consider it as a guide - in fact, it really is a page draft filled with notes from running project

Introduction

For many years, I was pretty happy with my 600E; it is a excellent laptop, which performs very well running MS Windows OS as well as any UNIX-like I put on it (there were three FreeBSD versions and several Linuxes). However, during my recent trip to Florida I discovered that this platform is not good for long travel:

• it doesn't play DVDs very well
• it eats batteries - two hours is not enough for the four-hour flight from Denver to Ft.Lauderdale
• modern image editing applications such as Canon Digital Photo Professional take too long to execute

Immediately after returning home I started looking around and after careful considerations bought this T40p. There is not much difference between machines in T40-T42 range, especially if you are good with screwdriver; however, T40s are substantially cheaper on eBay.

I'm trying to make a machine with good performance and power consumption; luckily, with Pentium-M we can get both. The machine would have both Windows and Linux on it.

First steps

Hardware setup

The original 40Gb drive was replaced with 100Gb. I didn't care much about losing recovery partition - with recently introduced Software Installer IBM-specific Windows drivers and tools could be installed automagcally.

The rest of the upgades that I'm planning (memory, CPU, wireless "g" mini-PCI card) could wait for now.

I then installed Windows XP, asking it delete all partitions from the disk, make 32Gb (32768Mb) primary "C:" partition, and another 32Gb primary "D:" partition. 32G is the maximum allowable size for FAT32, and we want FAT32 to be able to write to from Linux. I formatted "C:" and "D:" with FAT32, and put Windows on "C:".