Linux on an IBM Thinkpad R32

I have bought a IBM Thinkpad R32 from Notebook for Students in August 2002. The laptop shipped with Micrsoft Windows XP Professional pre-installed. On this page, I want to share my experience of installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 on this laptop, but any other up-to-date linux distribution should do as well.

Technical Information

To be exact: The Laptop is a IBM Thinkpad R32 2658-BQG with the following features:

• Intel Pentium 4 Mobile CPU 1.60Ghz
• ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6
• 256MB RAM
• 20GB hard disk
• DVD-ROM
• 100Mbit ethernet
• 11Mbit Wavelan
• Sound
• (Win-)Modem

You can view the output of "lspci -v" if you are interested.

Overview

As a quick result, linux works fine on the laptop and nearly everything is supported. I had to add some lines to apt.sources to install software not available in woody. I managed to use almost all features of the laptop, including X11, dualhead, sound, ethernet, WLAN and USB. However, I did not get the internal modem to work, see below for details.

Installation

The Laptop comes with two partitions, one ntfs holding Windows XP and one FAT as a rescue partition. I used Partition Image to resize resize before installing linux. This disables the BIOS's restore option t normally appears on boot-up, but you can still start the a rescue process (if you ever need to) by booting from the fat partition via your favourite boot-loader (e.g. grub).

Installation of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody) went smoothly, using a bootable net-install cd.

In the initial configuration, all PCI interrupts are mapped to one real interrupt. I encountered some strange problems that went away when I configured them to use different IRQs in the BIOS, so I encourage you to do this as well.

X11

The laptop has a ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY video card, which is supported by XFree86 4.2.x's radeon driver. As woody is shipped with an older version, you have to use one of the various backports to stable, for example from www.backports.org.

The video chipset supports dual-head which means, that you can connect a external monitor and use xinerama to have a desktop that strechtes over both screens. Here is my XF86Config for dual-head.

In previous versions there was a problem that you had to disconnent the external crt before booting the laptop in order to get dual-head work. This can be fixed by adding the 'Option "DDC" "Off"' to the monitor section of the internal LCD screen (thanks to Mark Caroll for this hint). See my example configuration for details.

Of course, you can always use the normal function key for display switching (Fn-F7) to toggle between display-only, crt-only or dual-mode, in which case you have the same image on the display and the external monitor (useful for presentations).

Sound

Sound works with the standard-kernel i810_audio module or with ALSA's snd-intel8x0 module. I prefer the alsa driver, as the OSS driver does not handle a system suspend gracefully, if some application (e.g. the KDE arts sound server) accesses the soundcard.

Networking

Ethernet

The integrated 100Mbit ethernet chip is fully supported by the eepro100 module and works fine.

WLAN

The integrated WLAN chip is supported by the orinoco_pci module. The driver used to crash under heavy load, but this is fixed in recent versions of the driver (I'm using version 0.13e which comes with kernel 2.6.1). Here you can get a recent version of the orinoco driver for kernel 2.4.

APM

The laptop's powermanagement features can be used via linux's APM support. As APM is not very powerful, this mainly reduces to detection of ac power, battery status and suspend support. Going into suspend mode is done simply by closing the laptop, running apm -s or using IBM's function key.

If you use apm you do not have direct control over power-saving features like reduction of processor frequency. However the BIOS is smart enough to reduce the frequency if you are not on ac power. Additionally, if you compile your kernel with the "make cpu idle calls when idle" your processor should save power if it is not used.

If you want to use the suspend mode, I highly recommend using the ALSA sound drivers, as you can experience crashes very frequenlty otherwise, especially if you are using KDE (because of its sound server): If any program uses the sound card (like kmix to control volume, or KDE's sound server artsd) while you are going to suspend, the laptop will crash, if you do not use ALSA.

In order to be able to try ACPI I had to use a BIOS update from IBM's website first, because it contains some ACPI related bugs that make the Linux kernel disable ACPI. Most things work fine, except the fan which is not detected. As standby is not supported very well with ACPI under Linux, I still prefer APM, which works fine.

CPU Frequency Scaling

The laptop has a "Intel Pentium 4 Mobile" CPU which means that it can change its clock speed in order to save power. Kernel 2.6 includes the necessary speedstep modules. I chose the "userspace-governor" together with powernowd which works great despite of its name.

Modem

Unfortunately, the built-in modem, is a WinModem, that is not supported properly. I had some success with a driver from Smartlink Media. Although the driver complains that the modem is not supported, it basically seems to work. I was able to connecto to some ISPs, but to others I couldn't and the connection was not very stable. It often went down after 10 or 15 minutes and sometimes a connect was not even possible ("NO CARRIER"). However, this shows, that support for the modem is possible and cannot be far away. If you know, how to use the modem effectively, please tell me.