Installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on a ThinkPad T61

We'll I got it basically working, so far (will update as i get more thing working).

Pre Installation Notes

SATA Issues

At first, the Ubuntu Live CD would not start at all, this seems to be a problem with the SATA AHCI driver. I had to go into the BIOS and change the SATA driver from ACHI to compatibility (What is the difference? Am I loosing performance?).

GM965 Woes... (Solved)

After that the CD seemed to boot but the screen was just garbage Picture. In order to get around that issue I had to go back and download the Alternate CD, which allows you to install in text only mode. From here, the text-only install went okay.

Post Installation Notes

More GM965 Woes... (Solved Also)

When I booted up after the installation, I was still getting the same garbage on the screen. To resolve this I edited my xorg.conf file as shown. I also had to install the latest kernel for Feisty, as the one off of the install disk did have have /dev/agpgart. And I could then use X11. There were still some issues however. The screen seemed somewhat fuzzy. This was a little more challenging of a fix... I found this mailing list posting, according to it, there was a small glitch in the driver. To fix it:

apt-get install source xserver-xorg-video-intel
cd xserver-xorg-video-intel-1.9.94/
vim src/i830_lvds.c
Goto line 230 and delete (PFIT_ENABLE | VERT_AUTSCALE ....);, replacing it with 0;  then quit vim
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b
cd ..
dpkg -i xserver-xorg-video-intel_1.9.94-lubuntu3_amd64.deb (wont be amd64 with a 32-bit install)

Now reboot your computer, and it should work. **NOTE: For some reason just restarting X didn't fix it, seems like you must reboot.** At this point you should have a nice, crisp display.

I am still working on aiglx and compiz (switching desktops on a cube doesnt seem to work, though I have some ideas...). There are some issues with OpenGL apps freezing Xorg as well, but the standard 2D desktop works flawlessly.

ThinkFinger

Ubuntu does not come with a package for thinkfinger. Downloading the most recent source and building it was simple enough: Download most recent version (0.3 at time of writing)

tar xvzf thinkfinger-0.3.tar.gz
cd thinkfinger-0.3/
./configure --with-securedir=/lib/security --with-birdir=/etc/pam_thinkfinger
make -j5             (hey its dual core!)
sudo make install

Configuring it is easy as well, open /etc/pam.d/common-auth:

auth sufficient pam_thinkfiger.so
auth required pam_unix.so try_first_pass nullok_secure

Now just run sudo tf-tool --add-user <username> and it will all be setup. (I found this somewhere on the web, I wish I could give a source but I'm afraid I cant find it, thank you Anonymous!).

HDAPS

This seems to be working fine now, I just follow the step on [How_to_protect_the_harddisk_through_APS]. Using hdaps-gl does the inverse of the accelerometer, though it's not really a big deal, the harddrive protection should still work.

Can you hear me now?.... What?

I upgraded to alsa 1.0.14 as it claims to have at least some support for the AD1984 chip, but so far it isn't looking good. I found a bug report on alsa's webpage and added a note about the information I could find, basically just a stack trace, hopefully this will be helpful to the guys at alsa.

Overall

I initially had some big problems getting this working, but now its working quite well. The wifi card worked at startup (uses madwifi) and I am happy because I don't seem to need any proprietary software to run this system.