Installing Ubuntu on a ThinkPad X31
Contents
Preface
I installed hoary ( Ubuntu "unstable") because of some specific needs. Netherless, this article should apply to Ubuntu 4.10 "The Warty Warthog" too.
Everything seems to work very fine.
See Henrik Brix Andersens page for a lot of useful information.
Installing without cdrom or floppy
Follow the instructions at UbuntuSupport: Netboot remarks
Choosing between APM and ACPI
Right now there is a crucial feature not working with ACPI on linux (2.6.9): suspend to ram does not switch off the LCD backlight. Ubuntu ships with ACPI enabled, but without ACPI suspend-to-disk being configured. In effect neither suspend mode is working out of the box.
Simply disableing ACPI at boottime activates APM which works fine with suspend to ram and suspend to disk.
On the other hand: having ACPI disabled will make your system use about 10% more power which reduces my battery runtime from ~4:00h to 3:40h.
Disableing ACPI and using APM
To disable ACPI and activate APM boot your kernel with acpi=off
...describe how to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst...
APM based suspend to disk needs a save2disk.img hibernation file on FAT16. Use the tphdisk utility to create this file.
Use Fn-F4 to suspend-to-ram and Fn-F12 to suspend-to-disk.
