Installing Gentoo 2008.0 beta2 on a ThinkPad X41 Tablet

More to come shortly!

Success Chart

Item		Working	Notes
Installation	Gentoo Minimal CD Installation	Yes
	Other Installation Methods (LiveCD(DVD), etc...)	Not tested	Don't see why it shouldn't work though.
Display	Laptop Screen	Yes	Brightness controls work fine.
	CRT / Projector	Yes	Well, sort of working...see below.
	Screen Rotation	Yes
	Stylus	Yes
Power Management	Software Suspend (hibernate)	Not Tested	Working on getting TuxOnIce-sources working.
	Suspend to Memory (ACPI sleep)	Yes	See details below.
	Battery	Yes	Charge/discharge thresholds, etc... working with tp_smapi.
Audio		Yes
Wireless	802.11b/g	Yes
	Bluetooth	Not Tested	Not present on my machine. Should work though.
	Infrared	Not Tested	Didn't bother..don't have anything to test it with anyhow.
Extra Buttons	Keyboard Section	Yes	thinkpad-acpi driver
	Tablet buttons	Yes	Using setkeycodes and xbindkeys.
Fingerprint Scanner		Yes	Using thinkfinger.
Harddisk Active Protection		Not Tested	Installed the tp_smapi hdaps driver, just haven't actively tested it yet.
X4 Ultrabase	Dock/Undock	Yes	Docking/Undocking requires a bit of tweaking...see below
	Ultrabay	Yes	DVD/CD-RW drive works fine. Haven't tried hot swapping a drive.
SD Card reader		Not Tested	Should work.
USB Drive		Yes

Install Prep

See Pre-Installation_steps for lots of good general info.

Note that this install was done with the Predesktop Area removed.

You probably should update the BIOS and HDD firmware if you haven't already.

Installation

Installation is very straightforward using the Gentoo x86 Handbook. I've tried to keep this guide independent of desktop environment. Wherever that is not true, it will (or should anyways) be noted.

Hint:

I highly suggest having a second computer nearby to follow along in the Handbook if you aren't comfortable installing Linux. Borrow your Mom's laptop if you have to.

The rest of the install guide assumes that you're following the Installation Handbook pretty much verbatim. Hopefully things are still clear if you're not.

The following subsections contain notes for each chapter of the Handbook.

Network configuration

I didn't try to get the wireless working for the install, rather I used wired networking. This worked like magic out of the box with the genkernel included on the install CD, wireless did not.

Disk partitioning

Works as advertised.

Installing the Gentoo Installation files

Hint:

If you're new to Linux, I would strongly recommend that you follow the instructions regarding the checksums, I actually had a few fail during the installation process. If one continually fails, try a different mirror.

Here is what I found worked well for my /etc/make.conf:

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium-m -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium-m -pipe"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
VIDEO_CARDS="i810 i830 i915"
INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse wacom"
USE="xscreensaver tetex latex acpi xinerama xrandr networkmanager gnome-keyring hdaps fluidsynth -kde"
ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0"

NOTE!

This is for a GNOME/gtk enviroment, change per your desired setup.

Installing the Base System

I used the desktop subprofile for my system:

# ln -snf /usr/portage/profiles/default/linux/x86/2008.0/desktop /etc/make.profile