Installing OpenSUSE 10.3 on a ThinkPad R61

Model

8919-6VG, BIOS 7KET71WW (1.21)

General

This installation instruction describes these parts that do not or do not completely work after my OpenSUSE 10.3 Final DVD installation.

Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M

NOTE!

When booting the installation DVD, do NOT select the resolution of 1280x1024 in GRUB. This is because SaX will not be able to configure the native resolution in this case. Choose 800x600 or 1024x768.

To install and configure the NVIDIA driver, follow the instructions of the openSUSE Wiki [1]. The URL of the NVIDIA rpm-md repository for 10.3 is ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/10.3/.

NOTE!

The brightness cannot be changed while X is displayed. Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to the first virtual console. There, change the brightness by pressing Fn-Pos1 or Fn-End. Then, press Ctrl-Alt-F7 to return to X.

Sound: AD1984

After installation, the speaker is turned off and the headphone is turned on. Use alsamixer to turn on the speaker switch. When using kmix in the "Mixer Window" there is a "Switches" tab where the speaker can be turned on. Then, select "PCM" as the "Master Channel" to be able to easily change the volume by, e.g., using the mouse wheel over the KMix tray icon.

UltraNav

TouchPad

The TouchPad is not a Synaptics but a ALPS. Furthermore, it is just recognized as a "PS/2 Generic Mouse" (hwinfo --mouse) by the kernel. Thus, the Synaptics TouchPad driver for X does not work. Consequently, there are no advandced features like scrolling available.

Trackpoint

The Trackpoint can be used to perform scrolling, similar to Windows. Just add the following options to the "InputDevice" section of the X.org configuration:

        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
        Option          "EmulateWheel"          "On"
        Option          "EmulateWheelButton"    "2"

Power Management

The machine is known to s2ram, but the chosen fixes do not work with the NVIDIA driver. If the framebuffer device is used for the virtual consoles, i.e., there is a nice splash screen while booting, s2ram -f -a 2 works from X. If not, s2ram -f is sufficient. See [2] for configuring additional s2ram options.

Integrated Fingerprint Reader

ThinkFinger, see How to enable the fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger, does not work. This is because the fingerprint sensor is now made by TouchStrip (USB vendor ID 0x147e).