Installing SUSE 10 on a ThinkPad TransNote

This page tells about installation of SUSE on a ThinkPad TransNote.

TODO	Introduction, general installation notes

Power Management

NOTE!

The following text is preliminary. In fact I thought it would work like this, but experienced kind of random malfunctioning of ibm_acpi or tpb (keys not triggered). I'm in the process of recompiling the SUSE kernel with the according functionality compiled directly into the kernel and hope that this may solve things.

SUSE 10, like any other SUSE version, uses powersaved for power management. powersaved attaches himself to acpid via a file socket, acpid is only running to forward all events to powersaved.

While the basic PM functionalities work out of the box, it gets a bit tricky when you want to enable ibm-acpi and tpb. Yes, tpb - the strange thing is that if something goes wrong with the ibm_acpi support, tpb will stop working.

Since SUSE has the individual ACPI support options compiled as modules, it is important that these modules get loaded in the right order. To assure that, you will need to do the following changes to some files in /etc/sysconfig. You can either manually edit the files or use the YAST2 interface to set the variables.

• It is important to load ibm_acpi after battery and ac and nvram after ibm_acpi. Also, doing this in ACPI_MODULES doesn't work for some reason. Hence, in /etc/sysconfig/kernel adjust the following lines:

MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="battery ac button ibm_acpi nvram"

• Also make sure that ibm_acpi is never unloaded, since it would cause trouble. In /etc/sysconfig/powersave/common adjust the following lines:

ACPI_MODULES_NOT_TO_UNLOAD="ibm_acpi ac battery button fan processor thermal"

• Powersaved complains about missing cpufreq support on boot. It might be good to switch to userspace frequency scaling. In /etc/sysconfig/cpufreq adjust the following line:

CPUFREQ_CONTROL="userspace"