Installing Fedora 10 on a Thinkpad X300

NOTE!

The Thinkpad X300 is equiped with a Fingerprint reader. It can only be enabled for the hard disk protection using the ThinkVantage utilities, which, to date, only exist for Windows. This means that if you plan to fully un-install Windows, you have to configure it before actually un-installing. If you keep a dual boot Windows/Linux, you can always do that later...

What works out of the box?

Almost everything works directly, without any additional configuration:

• Hard disk password protection
• Fingerprint reader
• Wifi
• Bluetooth
• Webcam
• Trackpoint/Touchpad
• USB & USB mouse
• Integrated keyboard light
• DVD burner
• Suspend/Hibernate
• Thinkpad special keys (NB: no problems reported with Gnome. Apparently, this does not work quite well with KDE as described in this bug)

Additional configuration

Setup YUM

For applications that are against Fedora licensing guidelines (typically MP3 and DVD players that will rely on proprietary formats), a 3rd party repository will have to be configured. For Fedora 10 this will be RPMFusion. To set up the RPMFusion repositories:

$ sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
$ sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
$ sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-*

Trackpoint middle button

1. Edit the config file /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-x11-input.fdi Basically, just add lines similar to the following in the "device" section:

   <match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
     <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout" type="string">200</merge>
   </match>

2. Then restart HAL and check the modifications appear among the device options that you can check via the output of lshal. Typically:

$ lshal | grep TrackPoint
info.product = 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint' (string)
input.product = 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint' (string)

3. Restart the X server

External links

• Additional configuration tips (incl. installing Flash plugins or Sun Java) on this blog