Installing SUSE 10 on a ThinkPad TransNote

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This page tells about installation of SUSE on a ThinkPad TransNote.

TODO
Introduction, general installation notes

TPB

The nvram module doesn't get loaded by default. To make the nvram module load at boot time, edit the /etc/sysconfig/kernel file to contain this line: 

MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="nvram"

Power Management

SUSE 10, like any other SUSE version, uses powersaved for power management. powersaved attaches itself to acpid via a file socket, acpid is only running to forward all events to powersaved.

While the basic PM functionalities work out of the box, it gets a bit tricky when you want to enable ibm-acpi and tpb.

SUSE 10 comes with a modified kernel 2.6.13, and has the individual ACPI support options compiled as modules. Trying different modules loading orders or including part of the modules into the kernel, didn't help making ibm-acpi work reliably. Hence the conclusion was to try and built a vanilla kernel.

While doing so, kernel 2.6.14 was used and the ACPI option modules were built into the kernel. Unpack the kernel source into /usr/src/, relink /usr/src/linux to point to /usr/src/linux-2.6.14. Copy the .config file from the old kernels source dir. Change into the new kernels source dir and configure the kernel to include processor, ac, battery, fan, thermal and button support rather than having it compiled as modules. Compile the kernel and copy the appropriate kernel image to the /boot directory. You need to copy System.map as well. Then edit /etc/sysconfig/kernel and adjust the line: 

INITRD_MODULES="piix reiserfs"

After that, recreate the initrd using mkinitrd. There is no need to update your menu.lst file, since the symlinks get adjusted by mkinitrd.

TODO
This info needs to be more detailed.
  • Also make sure that ibm_acpi is never unloaded, since it would cause trouble. In /etc/sysconfig/powersave/common adjust the following line:
ACPI_MODULES_NOT_TO_UNLOAD="ibm_acpi"
  • Powersaved complains about missing cpufreq support on boot. It might be good to switch to userspace frequency scaling. In /etc/sysconfig/powersave/cpufreq adjust the following line:
CPUFREQ_CONTROL="userspace"
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