Installing SUSE Professional 9.3 on a ThinkPad X32

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I recently (August 2005) bought a new X32 and installed SUSE Professional 9.3 on it. With the exception of some Radeon problems, everything worked without a hitch.

Hardware

The hardware configuration is as follows:

I also bought a Target USB 2.0 DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. The X32 can boot off USB devices.

Because I purchased a custom-to-order (CTO) model, it came without a hard drive, and I purchased my own from [NewEgg]. Therefore, I started with a clean disk, and didn't have to bother with the IBM pre-desktop area, Windows dual boot, etc. I just partitioned the drive into /boot, /, and /local, with a 1GB swap partition (to be used for suspend-to-disk).

Installation

I installed Suse 9.3 from DVD without any glitches. I ran Yast online update (YOU), using the wired Ethernet connection.

Everything basically worked out of the box. Suspend to disk works perfectly. Suspend to RAM works, too, except that the Radeon leaves the backlight turned on and continues to draw power during sleep mode.

I downloaded radeontool, and switched KDE from using its own screenscaver to xscreensaver, so I could also use the lightwatch script. I had to modify the suspend and restore scripts in /usr/lib/powersave/scripts to run radeontool.

Suse detected the Atheros chipset in the IBM 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI card, and installed the right drivers. It works fine. I have tested with all three types of access pointers (a, b, and g).

I don't use sleep mode for long periods of time, so the power drain problem doesn't bother me. I suspend to disk when I expect to leave the laptop alone for more than a few minutes.

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