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 Andersens page for a lot of useful background information.

Installing without cdrom or floppy

Follow the Netboot remarks instructions at UbuntuSupport.

Choosing between APM and ACPI

I tested both, APM and ACPI but settled with ACPI which now works like a charm.

Ubuntu ships with ACPI enabled, but without ACPI suspend-to-disk being configured. Since ACPI suspend to ram does not switch off the LCD backlight neither suspend mode is working out of the box. See below how to configure ACPI.

On the other hand: having ACPI disabled will make your system use about 10% more power which reduces my battery runtime from ~4:00h to 3:40h.

Please read "How to make use of Power Management features" for more in depth information.

Disabling ACPI and using APM

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

To disable ACPI boot your kernel with acpi=off

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

APM based suspend to disk needs a save2disk.img hibernation file on FAT16. Use the tphdisk utility to create this file.

Use Fn-F4 to suspend-to-ram and Fn-F12 to suspend-to-disk.