User talk:Gmetal

Installing Gentoo Linux 2006.1 on a Thinkpad T60

This page details my efforts on installing Gentoo Linux on my Lenovo Thinkpad T60 Model No. 2007FVG. My laptop has the following hardware configuration:

   * Audio: AD1981HD 
   * 15 TFT (1400 x 1050)
   * Mobile Intel 945PM Express 
   * Bluetooth
   * Gigabit Ethernet
   * Wireless LAN IEEE 802.11(a/b/g/n)
   * DVD-Writer 
   * Core 2 Duo - T5600 (1.83 GHz)
   * 1 GB RAM
   * 120 GB SATA-150 HDD
   * Trusted Platform Module (TPM 1.2) Security Chip 
   * Fingerprint reader 
   * ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 PCIe (x16) 128 MB 

Preliminary Steps and Gentoo Linux Setup

First step was to make space for my Linux partitions. Booted into Knoppix, resized the Windows partition (freeing about 90Gb of space for Linux) using QTParted. The hidden partition used by IBM/Lenovo for restoring the laptop was left untouched. I then created an extended partition on the free space and created the logical partitions for Linux. This machine is 64-bits, but I also wanted to be able to have a 32-bit environment. So I created two root partitions and a separate home partition. Furthermore, I also placed the directory holding the distfiles and portage into two separate partitions. All in all this is how drive was partitioned:

    * /dev/sda1   Windows NTFS
    * /dev/sda2   IBM Rescue partition
    * /dev/sda3   Extended partition
    * /dev/sda5   Boot partition
    * /dev/sda6   Swap artition
    * /dev/sda7   Portage partition
    * /dev/sda8   Distfiles partition
    * /dev/sda9   Gentoo64 root
    * /dev/sda10  Gentoo32 root
    * /dev/sda11  /home partition

Once this was finished I proceeded to reboot and use the Gentoo Linux 2006.1 installation cd for the AMD64 architecture (which is what should be used for a 64-bit installation on a Core 2 Duo).

The installation was quite smooth and was done according to the Gentoo Handbook: [1] The only glitch the kernel that I built, which was done with a manual # make menuconfig and not with Gentoo's genkernel. Once I restarted the laptop, my kernel booted fine but was unable to mount the root partition. Turns out that it needed the following .config entries:

     * CONFIG_PARTITION_ADVANCED
     * CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION

Once I added these entries to my .config and rebuilt the kernel, everything went fine and I booted into Linux.