Installing Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on a ThinkPad T410

This article describes the installation of Ubuntu 9.10 (32/64 bit) on a Thinkpad T410 type 2522-3FG (with nVidia graphics card).

Hardware Support Details

Intel Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000) PCI-Express only uses 10Mb/s (full duplex) by default, a higher rate is possible with manual configuration: # ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off

This is due to a bug in the intel e1000 driver that is included in Karmic. The new driver for the e1000e which can be downloaded from

www.downloadcenter.intel.com

works nicely. It has to be compiled and installed manually though. Remember to delete the old driver from lib/modules/....

WLAN: WLAN is not supported out of the box in karmic. 'apt-get install linux-backports-module-karmic' will install the backported driver.

nVidia NVS 3100m Graphics: install restricted drivers to get better colors, but
- brightness control (Fn + Home, Fn + End) does not work. It displays the brightness indicator, which can be adjusted up and down. But the actual screen brightness does not change. As a workaround switch to text mode via Ctrl-Alt-F1, then brightness control works, so can adjust to your wanted brightness, and then switch back to graphics mode via Alt-F7.

A permanent fix is to include

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

in the "Device" section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

4 GB memory and 32 bit kernel: the default kernel (linux-generic) only uses 3 GB memory, with the linux-generic-pae kernel $ cat /proc/meminfo shows MemTotal: 3977248 kB. The 64 bit system works fine, so I'd say why bother with 32 bit?

The I/O scheduler default in Karmic is CFG. This seems to be the cause for frequent system lag here. The anticipatory scheduler has proven to give a more responsive system under high I/O load:

apt-get install sysfsutils

add to /etc/sysfs.conf:

sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler = anticipatory

The remaining devices are currently not tested.