Installing Debian Sid (September 2004) on a ThinkPad T42p

Unfortunately there are no detailed instructions here, yet. During my install of Debian Linux on my T42p I found the following Links to be very, very useful, though:

• A page with instructions for T40p. Lots of useful info
• Two more pages about Debian on T42p's: here and here
• Enabling Powerplay (Radeon Power saving) in three simple steps for debian XFree packages
• the original (closed-source) ATI drivers pre-packaged for debian (to be compiled into a module deb with make-kpkg)
• An interesting [http://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Evbraun/computing/T41/power.html

Benchmark Page on Powersaving] with Windows vs Linux and APM vs ACPI

• A page documenting the first attempts to get hardware acceleration for the R300 GPU (the one built into the T42p) running without the closed-source ATI drivers.
• another special and useful kernel module: IBM-ACPI
• BIOS Updates from IBM

For the first boot and maybe even the first install I recommend a recent Image of Kanotix (a Knoppix descendant with lots of notebook-specific extensions built-in, so it should boot your Thinkpad with most bells and whistles right out of the box!)

If you want to keep your WinXP partition and you dont want to shell out lots of money for PartitionMagic, you can use ntfsresize. The version to be found in kanotix is fairly old and cannot cope well with fragmented volumes so I recommend booting kanotix, getting it online and using the latest version to be found at the ntfsresize link. Be sure to resize your Windows partition AFTER having resized ntfs and TAKE CARE not to make the partition smaller than you made the ntfs.

The following Debian packages are relevant to your Thinkpad installation:

Kernel:

• kernel-source-2.6.8 (or the latest version available)
• sl-modem-source (for the built-in modem)
• ipw2100-source (if you have the "simple" 802.11b WLAN option, otherwise not)
• thinkpad-source
• (optional) the closed-source ATI drivers pre-packaged for debian

Other:

• sl-modem-daemon (modem)
• tpb (for the thinkpad buttons a nifty OSD, actually alot nicer than the WinXP one!)
• tpctl (needed to control some functions of the thinkpad kernel extensions)
• thinkpad-base

DO NOT USE:

• tleds (this package will fuck up your keyboard during network-io and tremendously slow down network throughput)