Installing Fedora 10 on a ThinkPad T61p

Introduction

This document outlines configuring Fedora 10 on your Thinkpad T61p. Most items will work out of the box and a base install will provide you with an almost completely working system. Everything not mentioned on this wikipage is assumed to be working out of the box. Due to the modular nature of the T61 Series there are many different configurations, please read carefully and only make the changes specific to your system.

Feel free to update this Wiki with your information however please ask questions on the Talk page.

Please look here for further informations as well:

• Installing Fedora 10 Generic Notes

Installation Notes

The Graphical installer works just fine with the NVIDIA Cards. However, on WUXGA Models the Font within the installer can be tiny because of the wrong calculation of the screen's DPI value. You can use either the i386 or the x86_64 version on your ThinkPad. If you don't have more than 3GB of RAM you'll probably be better off installing the i386 version unless you have a good reason to use 64-bit software. But even if you do have more than 3GB of RAM you might want to install the i386 version for better software compatibility. The installer will then automatically choose the PAE kernel which enables the system to use the full amount of RAM installed.

Please note, that the SATA Mode must be set to AHCI. By default it is set to Compatibility within the BIOS.

Display/Video

Currently you have three options what graphics drivers are concerned:

1. the 2D nv driver shipped with Fedora
2. the (currently only) 2D nouveau driver also shipped with Fedora
3. the proprietary 2D/3D nVidia drivers (preferably installed from RPMFusion)

One big pro of the open-source drivers (nv/nouveau) is the support for XRandR 1.2. That allows you to hotplug screens (e.g. a Projector) and configure them without restarting the X Server. Using those drivers will also automatically enable the Fn-F7 button's function of switching between screens. The official NVIDIA drivers do not have this feature at the moment (so the Fn-F7 button is currently without function if you use them). So if you do presentations a lot you might want to use the open-source drivers.

Installing the official NVIDIA drivers from RPMFusion

Now that's easy:

yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia akmod-nvidia

This will install the X11 driver as well as the kernel module. Note that this is a special kind of kernel module; a so called akmod. It automatically tries to rebuild the kernel module if it isn't found. You will never have to wait for the RPMFusion maintainers to recompile the module when a new kernel is released again.