Installing Fedora Core 5 on a ThinkPad T30

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Installation of Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) on a ThinkPad T30 (xxxx-xxx). These notes cover an upgrade (not a fresh install) from a successful working FC3 installation.

Summary

What works out of the box

  • Ethernet
  • Onboard display (1400x1050)

What needs to be fixed post-install

  • Dual-Head Mode
  • NTFS volume mounting
  • Keyboard light and brightness control (see notes re TPB and OSD)

Not tested

  • PCMCIA Slots
  • Wireless
  • Bluetooth
  • Modem
  • DVD / CD-R
  • Controlling the fan and system LEDs
  • What else?

Details

Getting the system booted

I simply inserted the FC5 DVD into the drive and booted into it, and selected a few items to take me into an upgrade-in-place.

When the upgrade completed it booted immediately into FC5.

My system was configured for dual-boot using GRUB (not NT) as the primarly bootloader (MBR) and chainloading back to Windows when necessary. This makes linux installation easier. Returning from the NT bootloader back to linux requires copying the grub boot block into NT, which can be done using commonly-available instructions.

What needs to be fixed post-install

Dual-Head Mode

This was very important for me as I use an external Dell 2000FP monitor (1600x1200) as my primary programming monitor. When I configured dual-head mode, the screen layed out properly for two pages (spanning mode) but the external monitor never activated.

An experimental ATI driver update was found [[ http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/5/i386/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.5.8.0-1.i386.rpm | here]]. I followed the directions suggested [[ http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-list/2006-May/msg02069.html | here]] and my external monitor works now in spanning mode with 1600x1200 resolution. Hopefully this note can be removed or updated when this newer driver is promoted into the regular FC5 updates system.

NTFS volume mounting

Keyboard light and brightness control