Installing Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) on a ThinkPad Edge E135

This is a short guide to installing Debian 7.0 (wheezy, currently testing, installer beta 4) on a ThinkPad Edge E135.

It is sufficient to get the base system running; several subsystems have not yet been tested. As wheezy is not released yet, some steps might not be necessary in the future any more.

Installation

Debian can be installed from a USB device (the E135 does not have an optical drive). The installer asks for firmware for the ethernet and wifi interfaces; those requests can safely be ignored. Wired ethernet will work without the firmware as well (but seems limited to 100mbps). If a firmware-brcm80211 package is provided on an additional USB stick, the module can be loaded and wifi can be used. (Connecting required unusually good signal quality; whether the antenna is just weak or this is a configuration bug remains to be seen.)

Graphics

When the installer has completed and the system reboots, interrupt the bootloader by pressing e and add these parameters to the kernel line:

radeon.modeset=0 1

Log in using your root password, download all the .bin files from [1] into /lib/firmware/radeon, and install libdrm2 and libdrm-radeon1 from the experimental repositories (>=2.4.40). That can be accomplished by those commands, assuming you are connected to a typical wired network:

1. dhclient eth0
2. mkdir /lib/firmware/radeon
3. cd !$
4. wget -m -l1 http://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/
5. mv people*/*/*/*.bin .
6. echo "deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ experimental main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list
7. sed "s/^deb cdrom/# &/" /etc/apt/sources.list
8. apt-get update
9. apt-get -t experimental install libdrm2 libdrm-radeon1
10. reboot

Since GDM and Gnome seem to have issues with the graphics system provided by this setup, that would also be a good time to install xdm and xfce4.

After rebooting, you should be able to log in graphically.

wifi

The wifi card is soft blocked at bootup (meaning that the OS thinks that something in the hardware is suggesting that wifi better be off). It can be explicitly unblocked with the rfkill utility, but in practice, installing the urfkill package is recommended, which makes the toggle-wifi (Fn-F9) hardware button work.

Open issues

• Gnome and GDM don't work.

Further references

• installation report on the Debian bug tracking system