Installing Debian 3.1 (Sarge) (alternative) on a ThinkPad T42

Some notes I took for my install (drop me a line at koalillo-at-fastmail-dot-fm):

IBM THINKPAD T42 (2373VUW)

I installed Debian Sarge (testing with selected packages from unstable/experimental).

Kernel

• Set preemptive kernel
• Add madwifi
• Add patch from: http://bugme.osdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3022 , adding the 2373VUW model
• Add swsusp
• $ make-kpkg --append-to-version -t42 --initrd kernel_image modules_image

Additional packages

• acpid
• alsa-base, alsa-utils, alsa-oss
• anacron
• gnome-volume-manager
• libc6-i686
• tpb for OSD display of IBM keys and remapping the Access IBM key

Frequency scaling

• Load modules: cpufreq_ondemand, speedstep-centrino
• Add the following to your startup sequence # echo >/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor ondemand

HDAPS

• Add module hdaps
• Add package hdaps-utils

Additional modules

• ibm_acpi
• nvram

ACPID

• To map Fn-F4 (suspend) and Fn-F12 (hibernate)

/etc/acpi/events/ibm

event=ibm/hotkey
action=/etc/acpi/ibm.sh %e

/etc/acpi/ibm.sh

#!/bin/sh
case $4 in
       00001004) /usr/local/sbin/suspend.sh mem ;;
       0000100c) /usr/local/sbin/suspend.sh disk ;;
esac

/usr/local/sbin/suspend.sh

#!/bin/sh
ifdown ath0
echo -n $1 >/sys/power/state
ifup ath0
/etc/init.d/hotplug restart # testing if this solves my Bluetooth problems, see below

• Add # echo enable >/proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey to enable hotkey reporting to ACPI

GRUB

• Add resume=<swap device> so that the system finds the hibernated ram on power up
• Add a noresume option to boot without recovering the hibernation

Caveats

• Using cifs causes hiccups suspending/hibernating, use smbnetfs
• I get some USB errors when enabling/disabling Bluetooth after sleep/hibernation, like:

usb 4-1: device not accepting address 5, error -71 googling around it seems like restarting hotplug (or reloading the usb modules) solves the problem... I'll test that