Installing Gentoo on a ThinkPad A30p

Installing Gentoo Linux on a Thinkpad A30p

The thinkpad A30p is delivered with Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional, respectively. These preinstalled versions can be reinstalled via the IBM workarea which is a bootable hidden partition (/dev/hda2, approximately 1GB).

Partitioning

You can partition the harddisk as you want. If you keep the portage tree (300MB+) and the distfiles directory (fills up with source code packages fast) on a separate partition, you can install Gentoo with X.org and KDE and some development tools on a 3GB partition and have at least 1GB free.

For easy maintenance you should keep /home separately.

Kernel configuration

I successfully used the kernel versions 2.6.4 and 2.6.7 on my A30p. Any recent kernel should run flawlessly as the A30p is not a difficult computer at all (no ACPI, no wireless).

The network card is a Intel Pro/100 VE which runs with the eepro100 module. The USB controller works with the uhci_hcd module.

For PCMCIA support you have to load the yenta_socket module and change the configuration file /etc/conf.d/pcmcia (replace PCIC=i82365 with PCIC=yenta_socket).

Sound support

The sound card which identifies as "Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)" can be used with the ALSA drivers, namely the snd_intel8x0 module.

Power management

The A30p has a stable APM implementation. Suspend/Resume works very good, even with X11 started.

The Mobile Pentium 3 speedstep feature can be used for additional power savings. You have to load the module speedstep_ich and speedstep_lib module and the desired scaling governor modules (cpufreq_performance, cpufreq_powersave). I use a script to switch to slow speed when on battery and to high speed (performance) when on AC power.