Installing Fedora Core 6 on a ThinkPad T60

• Note: this page is a work in progress

Installation

Installation of Fedora Core 6 (Zod) on a Thinkpad T60 (xxxx). The installation completes successfully but installs the i586 kernel instead of the required i686 kernel. The wrong kernel is due to a known bug in the Anaconda installer.

Works Out of the Box

• Wired Networking on eth0 (e1000 driver)
• Video at 1400x1050 (VESA driver)
• Touchpad / Mouse
• Think-Light
• Sound (snd-hda-intel driver)
• Suspend to RAM under Gnome

Requires Tweaking

• Wireless Networking (Requires ipw3945 driver)
• 3d
• MP3 / MP4A Playback
• Suspend to Disk / Hibernate

Post Install

Getting Up to Date

Before completing installation, it's best to get up to date by running yum update as root or by using the new graphical updater, Pup, that ships with Fedora Core 6. After all updates are installed, reboot before continuing the post-install tasks.

Replacing the Kernel

As previously mentioned, the i586 kernel is installed on this machine instead of the i686 version. The i686 version is required to install the ATI video drivers and Intel Wireless drivers required to get this machine 100% operational.

Installing the new kernel can be done by various methods as documented on the Red Hat Bugzilla bug. However, the safest method is to use yum to do the kernel swap.

To swap kernels:

1. Open up a terminal window are become root.
2. Execute: yum remove kernel
3. Make note of any other packages that will be removed due to dependency issues. The packages will have to be reinstalled in the next step.
4. Install the kernel.i686 package and any other packages removed in the previous step.
5. Fix your Grub configuration
6. Reboot

On a minimal install, the only dependencies removed were gnome-session, compiz, gnome-volume-manager, and pcmciautils. Getting things back on track required:

# yum install kernel.i686 gnome-session compiz gnome-volume-manager pcmciautils

After [Yum] completes, you will have to fix the boot loader or you will be unable to boot after a restart.

Again as root, fire up your favorite text editor and add the following lines to your grub configuration (/boot/grub/grub.conf) just below the initial comments:

title FC6 2.6.18-1.2798
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

Setting Up Additional Repositories

In order to get the ATI driver and the Intel Wireless working, you will need to add two repositories to your computer; Livna RPMs and AT-RPMs repositories to your machine.

Enabling Livna's Repository

As root, rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm .

Enabling AT-RPMs Repository

As root, use your favorite editor to create /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo and type in;

[atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/fc$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1

ATI Video Driver

I still haven't gotten this working. While the driver installs, X fails to use direct Open GL rendering. There appears to be a problem with the fglrx driver not supporting composite rendering used be default in Fedora Core 6.

Stay tuned for the fix once I get it working.

Wireless Networking

To use the T60's built in wireless networking driver, you will need to install ipw3945 driver. The AT-RPMs repository, mentioned earlier in this article, provides the necessary packages. As root:

# yum install ipw3945d ipw3945-ucode ipw3945-kmdl-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.i686

Once installed, you must add a startup script to have ipw3945d started at boot. Create the following script in a file named /etc/init.d/ipw3945d

#! /bin/bash
#
# ipw3490d      Load / unload Intel ipw3490 daemon
#
# chkconfig: 2345 09 90
# description:  Load / unload Intel ipw3490 daemon
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: ipw3490d
### END INIT INFO

# Source function library.
. /etc/init.d/functions

if [ ! -f /etc/sysconfig/network ]; then
    exit 0
fi

case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting ipw3945d: "
        /sbin/ipw3945d > /dev/null 2>&1
        echo
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping ipw3945d: "
        killproc ipw3945d
        echo
        ;;
  status)
        status ipw3945d
        ;;
  restart)
        cd "$CWD"
        $0 stop
        $0 start
        ;;
  *)
        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status}"
        exit 1
esac

exit 0

Now, add the script with chkconfig to be started on boot:

chkconfig --add ipw3945d

Make sure things are setup correctly by running chkconfig --list ipw345d. Your output should look something like:

# chkconfig --list ipw3945d
ipw3945d        0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

If everything looks okay, reboot. Once restarted you should be able to run ifconfig eth1 and see information about your wireless card.