Installing Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) on a ThinkPad Edge E135
This is a short guide to installing Debian 7.0 (wheezy, currently testing) on a ThinkPad Edge E135.
It is sufficient to get the base system running; several subsystems have not yet been tested. As wheezy is not released yet, some steps might not be necessary in the future any more.
Installation
Debian can be installed from a USB device (the E135 does not have an optical drive). The installer asks for firmware for the ethernet and wifi interfaces; those requests can safely be ignored. (FIXME: ethernet had basic function w/o firmware, right?)
When the installer has completed and the system reboots, interrupt the bootloader by pressing e and add these parameters to the kernel line:
radeon.modeset=0 1
Log in using your root password, download all the .bin files from [1] into /lib/firmware/radeon, and install libdrm2 and libdrm-radeon1 from the experimental repositories (>=2.4.40).
Since GDM and Gnome seem to have issues with the graphics system provided by this setup, that would also be a good time to install xdm and xfce4.
After rebooting, you should be able to log in graphically.
Open issues
- The wifi kill switch appears permanently on.
- Gnome and GDM don't work.
