Installing Ubuntu on a ThinkPad X31

Preface

I installed hoary ( Ubuntu "unstable") because of some specific needs. Netherless, this article should apply to Ubuntu 4.10 "The Warty Warthog" too.

Everything seems to work very fine.

See [Henrik Brix Andersen] page for a lot of useful information.

Choosing between APM and ACPI

Right now there is a crucial feature not working with ACPI on linux (2.6.9): suspend to ram does not switch off the LCD backlight. Ubuntu ships with ACPI enabled, but without ACPI suspend-to-disk being configured. In effect suspend is not working out of the box.

(maybe ACPI works better with acpi_sleep=s3_bios)

Simply disableing ACPI at boottime activates APM which works fine with suspend to ram and suspend to disk.

APM based suspend to disk needs a save2disk.img hibernation file on FAT16. See below.

Installing without cdrom or floppy

Follow the instructions at UbuntuSupport: Netboot remarks

Disableing ACPI

To disable ACPI an activate APM boot your kernel with acpi=off

...describe how to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst...

Creating a APM hibernation file

Use tphdisk utility to create a save2disk.img file on a hidden FAT16 partition,