Installing OPENSUSE 10.3 on a ThinkPad T61p

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Introduction

Experiences installing OpenSUSE 10.3 x86_64 on a T61 as a dual boot system with Windows Vista.

Partitioning and boot loader

OpenSUSE suggested to shrink the windows partition to 60GB which was fine since I spend most of mytime in OpenSUSE. However, the linux partitions needed some changes from what was proposed as a default (everything under an extended partition) to ensure dual boot. After the windows partition, I chose:

  • A primary partition of 100MB (Ext3) as /boot (check that "set partition to active" is flagged) to install GRUB
  • An extended partition for the rest:
    • Partition for /
    • Partition for /home

For GRUB, I chose to install to /boot and kept the default choices.

Graphics card

OpenSUSE 10.3 recognizes the Nvidia Quadro FX 570M card, but this gives a somewhat false feeling of safety. The installation of OpenSUSE completed without a glitch. At the end of the installation, OpenSUSE directs you to the graphical login screen which resulted in a blank screen.

Pressing ctrl-alt-backspace gets you out of the X11 server and shows a nice prompt. After spending some time searching for the problem I came up with the following: Check in the BIOS that under Display, the display to boot is set to "Thinkpad LCD" (mine was set to Analog(VGA) which tries to use an eternal screen). Afterwards I ran xorgconfig and chose the generic Nvidia driver.

Next I installed the Nvidia driver available from the Nvidia website.

another Laptop with 1920x1200 resolution:

No graphical login screen at all (just a blank screen) after installation because of a unusable xorg.conf. Pressing ctrl-alt-backspace did not work. Using (ctrl-)alt-F1 to go to first console has also no effect. How to get it run:

Boot into runlevel 3 (just type 3 at boot prompt of grub) and login as root. cd to /etc/X11. copy xorg.conf.install to xorg.conf. After that run startx to get a gui, open konqueror and go to http://opensuse-community.org/nvidia.ymp to install the nvidia driver. Final open a console and enter nvidia-xconfig to use the nvidia driver. After a restart of the X-server you can use the graphical login.

Sound

Download the latest alsa packages: alsa, alsa-utils, also-tools. At the time of this writing these were the 1.0.16 versions. Next run alsaconf.

Conclusion

All considered, a fairly straightforward install. OpenSUSE happily coexists with Windows.

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