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 ethernet
• Video at 1400x1050(VESA driver)
• Touchpad / Mouse
• Think-light

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 cpmuter; 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