Installing Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on a ThinkPad T61

Comprehensive review: http://www.eastwoodzhao.com/ubuntu-904-jaunty-jackalope-on-thinkpad-t61/

Items that work out of the box

Intel Video: 2D and 3D acceleration quite messed up, see section below

Nvidia Video: 2D and 3D acceleration works

Wireless: Intel cards tested. Arethros wireless card works, but seems far more unstable then 8.10 (Did tweak 9.04 a bit though, so will do clean install to confirm).

Network Card: Intel 10/100/1000 tested

Wireless switch: Tested.

Webcam: Not tested.

Headphones: Works out of the box

Microphone: Just needs to be activated.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Most of them work out of the box, including the ThinkVantage button, although it is unassigned, see section below

Fingerprint Reader: some packages, i.e. thinkfinger-tools, installed by default, otherwise same fix as with 8.10 required.

Items that need (some) tweaking to obtain full functionality

Emulate Wheel (Middle-click scrolling)

Michael Vogt described how to get middle-click scrolling to work again in Intrepid. Xorg.conf is not used to configure mice and keyboards anymore, but evdev is. This makes the configuration of middle-click scrolling a little bit different than previous versions of Ubuntu. In terminal:

$ sudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi

Past and save the following code, which will give vertical wheel emulation only:

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxsisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
</match>

There is another method to get horizontal scrolling as well, but I don't think it worked for me.

Enabling touchpad on/off key (fn-f8)

The procedure shown here for T500 also works for T61.

Intel Graphics

There have been significant regressions with many intel graphics chip in 9.04 Jaunty. There is an active Ubuntu Forums thread discussing the problem.

To significantly improve performance, install the Debian 2.6.30-rc2 kernel as per the thread, add the xorg-edgers PPA,

Ammend your xorg.conf file to include the following:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Option		"AccelMethod"		"uxa"
	Option		"AddARGBVisuals" 	"True"
	Option		"AddARGBGLXVisuals"     "True"
	EndSection

and fix the MTRR issue.

The script fixmtrr.sh should read:

echo "Before:"
echo "-------"
cat /proc/mtrr
echo "base=e0000000 size=0x10000000 type=write-combining" >| /proc/mtrr

echo ""
echo "After:"
echo "------"
cat /proc/mtrr

ATTENTION!

The new kernel will disable screen brightness shortcut keys and usplash, but the previous kernel can be booted with GRUB.

Compiz

The Intel graphics chip has been blacklisted upstream by Compiz. To ignore the blacklist, download and run the script Compiz-Check available here.