Installing OPENSUSE 11.1 on a ThinkPad T61p

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Configuration

My T61p is a 6457-BQG, Intel Core2Duo 2,6GHz, 4GB RAM, 180 GB HDD, Nvidia Quadro FX 570M, 15.4" TFT (1900x1200), Intel AGN 4965 wifi, Bluetooth, Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio.

Partitioning

Factory disk: two partitions: r&r and vista. I was first preparing a dual boot system, but gparted was not able to resize the vista partition. After many retries, I dropped the idea of dual boot and decided for suse-only system. I kept only the r&r and partitioned the rest with gparted as: 

/dev/sda1 r&r 6GB
/dev/sda2 /boot 64MB
/dev/sda3 extended
/dev/sda5 / 40GB
/dev/sda6 swap 4GB
/dev/sda7 /home 130GB

Network install was almost without problems (the partition configuration had to be edited during the installation, since the installers was offering some foolish configuration).

Setup - 1st try - KDE4

First I have choosen KDE4 for desktop enviroment. Installed nvidia driver from source (needs kernel source package installed) instead of rpm. It seemed that these components

  • suspend to RAM (add S2RAM_OPTS="--force" to /etc/pm/config.d/defaults)
  • composite effects in KDE4 (add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf with # nvidia-xconfig --composite)
  • wireless

are in conflict. The most stable configuration was running an older nvidia driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-177.82-pkg2.run). I had a couple of freezes, sometimes the keyboard was not functional, wireless did not always come up after s2ram.

Setup - 2nd try - GNOME

I wanted to give a try to GNOME and reinstalled the whole system. In the meantime a new nvidia driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.29-pkg2.run) came out, I have choosen that one.

  • suspend to RAM works (without editing /etc/pm/config.d/defaults).
  • wireless does not always come back after s2ram. You can fix it by removing and loading a wireless kernel module (# modprobe -r iwlagn; modprobe iwlagn), in case if it does not come up.
  • composite effects in GNOME were OK. However in terminal the texts were not always displayed correctly; if a window was updated, only parts of it was refreshed, I had to bring the cursor above the elements to make them refresh. I have played with many xorg and compiz parameters (switched sync_to_vblank off; refresh rate set to 60). The problem has completely vanished after removing the --loose-binding in COMPIZ_OPTIONS in /usr/bin/compiz-manager. See [1].
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