Thinkpad x61s Notes

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Notes on setting up gutsy on my new x61s

As these notes improve, I plan to xfer them to the Thinkwiki x61s page

Contents

Installation

  • I could not boot off of my external cd drive. The splash screen came up, but hung on boot. I finally installed ubuntu using a thumbnail drive
  • Partitioning - I did a manual partition using the ubuntu installer. I bit the bullet and deleted my vista partition (I left the protected area in place - its actaully a fully bootable os, with diagnostic tools, and even a browser.
  • Important change /etc/fstab to mount drives noatime, nodiratime - this made a big differnece for heat (and power)

Hard Drive parking and Battery Recharging Control

  • TP_smapi
  • Control Script
  • tp_smapi also replaces the hdaps thing that is supposed to park the drive when the machine jerks around
  • well, got the drives installed, but the hdaps only detects the accelerometer. Parking is gonna be a bit tougher

Power Tweaking

  • powertop
  • usbcore.autosuspend=1 to the kernel command line in the grub config
  • iwpriv eth1 set_power 5 (figure out how to set to be default

Sleep/Hibernate

  • Troubleshooting http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=505890
  • sleep now recovers, with the backlight intact, but I didn't use [1], instead, I found DOUBLE_CONSOLE_SWITCH fix
  • suspend isn't working, although I could have sworn it once did - bug here - I don't think I upgraded my kernel. Maybe I never suspended, and only hibernated? I will try that grub conf change sooon.
  • well, its working again now, with the grub kernel option. hope its stable.
  • 1/12/10 - hibernate is back under koala. The problem was likely a missing resume= option in the startup
  • # defoptions=quiet splash acpi_sleep=s3_bios resume=UUID=361b16c8-1631-4527-82f\

a-521d314a9d55

VMWare

  • not fully prepared to completely relinquish windows, I set up vmware to run xp
  • gutsy has a broken package, so I had to do a manual installation. I downloaded the zip and followed the instructions.
  • I created a VMWare image here - then, had to (very nimbly) get into the bios to boot off the cd. I also needed to fiddle w/ the *.vmx file to force it to recognize my external cd rom drive as a cd
  • Sound issues in vmware - here's the fix the alsa-oss fix worked
  • Hardy updates - vmware-player patch (or hack alternative (direct link to vmware-player

3D effects 

echo SKIP_CHECKS=yes > ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

I can actually turn compiz on and off through the regular appearance settings (System->Preferences->Appearance->Visual Effects). mplayer and google earth don't really work with compiz running, but flash video does.

  • Thread wondering if compiz will ever work on blacklist
  • Alternate ways to run video if compiz breaks - by using x for the video 
jonah@aurum:~$ SKIP_CHECKS=yes compiz &
Checking for Xgl: not present. 
Blacklisted PCIID '8086:2a02' found 
SKIP_CHECKS is yes, so continuing despite problems.
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: not present. 
Trying again with indirect rendering:
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: present. 
Checking for non power of two support: present. 
Checking for Composite extension: present. 
Comparing resolution (1024x768) to maximum 3D texture size (2048): Passed.
Checking for nVidia: not present. 
Checking for FBConfig: present. 
Checking for Xgl: not present. 
Starting gtk-window-decorator
/usr/bin/compiz.real (video) - Warn: No 8 bit GLX pixmap format, disabling YV12 image format

3D Accell, and intel graphics drivers 

% glxinfo  | head -5
  • This works! Horray!

Multiple Heads/Screens 

Virtual 3072 3072 ## should be enough

Media

SD Card

  • sd card io
  • Suprise! This Just Worked (tm)

Internal Microphone

ToDo

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