Installing Kubuntu 6.10 on a ThinkPad X60s
Contents
Installation of Kubuntu 6.10 on a ThinkPad X60s (model 1704-56G)
Summary
What works out of the box
- Everything not listed below :)
=== What needs to be fixed
- Suspend to memory (it worked but I broke it, see below)
- Integrated fingerprint reader
What has not yet been tested
- Bluetooth
- Modem
- TPM
- Firewire
Installation
The X60s lacks an optical drive, so installation was done using an IDE DVD-ROM drive installed into an USB HDD case. The laptop was first booted into Windows so the FAT32 partition would get converted into NTFS. The Kubuntu live environment was then booted from the DVD-ROM drive and the installation process was started from the desktop icon. During the installation, the Windows partition was resized from 70 GB to 20 GB and Linux partitions (1 GB swap, 20 GB /, the rest in /home) were created in the free space. The installation process then completed without errors.
Fixes after installation
First boots
I booted to the installed Kubuntu system, noticed that everything seemed fine and then booted back into Windows, which ran the disk checker, finding no errors. The NTFS resize process had not broken anything.
CPU frequency scaling
In Kubuntu the first core was correctly scaled down into 1,0 GHz but the second core stubbornly stayed at 1,67 GHz. I found out the second core was using the "performance" governor instead of "ondemand". The governor could be changed manually as follows:
echo ondemand | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor echo ondemand | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor
I also installed the package "sysfsutils" and added the following lines into /etc/sysfs.conf:
devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor=ondemand devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor=ondemand
This way the correct governor is selected at boot-time. Because I was using in-kernel frequency selection (ondemand governor), I removed the "powernowd" package and added the following lines into /etc/modules so that the cpufreq modules would still get loaded at startup:
freq_table speedstep_centrino cpufreq_ondemand
Suspend to memory
Soon after I first installed Kubuntu I tried both hibernate (suspend to disk) and suspend (suspend to RAM) which, to my amazement, actually worked. But I somehow managed to break them when I messed around with the frequency scaling stuff... Now the machine just hangs when I try to suspend, blinking the suspend led indefinitely. I have yet to find out what I did wrong, and how to fix it.
