ThinkWiki - User contributions [en]

Talk:Problem with DVI throughput

2005-11-16T16:11:31Z

Aeyea: /* Corruption and Flickering on T43 */

Here's some information I found:

Most DVI devices today use single-link DVI which supports a maximum bandwidth of 165 MHz [http://www.ddwg.org/dvi.html]. I suppose that ThinkPads provide a single-link DVI signal.

To calculate the bandwidth of your signal, in theory you just need to multiply the resolution with the vertical frequency. For example: 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz => 1600*1200*85 Hz = 163 MHz. This looks good, but it is outside the specs - because you need to take into account some extra time. CRTs need a so-called ''blanking time'' between the data for two display lines. This time is needed for something similar to a carriage return on a typewriter: The electron beam needs to be returned to the start of the next line. Additionally, some extra time is needed to transmit information about the border area around the real picture. About 25% of the bandwidth is used for these additional data. [http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041129/tft_connection-04.html]

This means, that there is no specific ThinkPad problem with the throughput - you are just trying to transfer video data at a rate that is outside the specs of DVI. Maybe the DVI transmitter inside the ThinkPad even works at this data rate. But the DVI receiver inside the monitor might be "overclocked".

TFTs don't really need extra time. So there is a chance of writing a display driver with a reduced blanking time. This might explain, why some people were successful with other drivers.

The effective maximum resolution for single link DVI should be around 1600x1200 @ 65 Hz, or @ 60 Hz to be on the sure side. Has anyone solved his problems by lowering the vertical frequency?

--[[User:137.226.40.2|137.226.40.2]] 14:23, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

== No problem on T41p ==

I have a T41p with 1400x1040 LCD and a Samsung SyncMaster 213T connected through the Port Replicator II with DVI 
After some windows registry hacks I can run the Samsung in 1600x1200 in single, clone display and extend display mode. 
Linux requires no such hacks and will happily run at 1600x1200

The picture through DVI is perfect with either desktop applications or running DVD video.

----
This is good news.
Do you run Linux in DualHead, MergedFB or CloneMode?
In Windows you have a clear video overlay all the time (like after every boot)?
Which drivers are you using in Linux and Windows, please list the with version numbers.

[[User:217.230.177.126|217.230.177.126]] 01:31, 10 Mar 2005 (CET)
----

==Question about DVI/LCD switching on T4x / Radeon M9 / Linux==
Has anyone been able to successfully switch back and forth between the LCD output and the Port Replicator II DVI output on Linux? How do you do it? My problem is described below:

[[http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-320973-highlight-.html]]

== No problems here ==

I installed the new catalyst drivers 5.6 using Patje's Mobility Moddingand it works for all resolutions. My laptop runs at 1400x1060 and my dvi screen at 1920x1200.
No problems that I can tell. The omega drivers (based on older catalyst drivers) blue screened my windows xp on boot.
----
Thanks for the info, it is a while since i tested with Catalyst and back then it didn't allow 1400x1050.

== Corruption and Flickering on T43 ==

No problems changing to 1600x1200 @60Hz on DVI passthrough using stock ATI drivers (6.14.10) and IBM presentation director on T43 and port replicator II. However the image is not stable - green dot artifacts flicker in approximately horizontal lines, while the screen blanks in and out. Completely stable at 1280x1024. Changing to the Omega drivers did not help at all. Also replacing ATI with Omega drivers somehow removed the presentation director key binding Fn-F7 and I had to reinstall it to get it back. Monitor is NEC AccuSync 200VX. Tried what appeared to be both single and dual-link DVI cables (not sure about monitor or port replicator support for dual-link).

I just tried the same setup while replacing the NEC monitor with a Planar PL2010M. The Planar LCD gives a completely stable image at 1600x1200.

UPDATE: I was able to get a stable 1600x1200 image on the NEC panel by going into the ATI Catalyst Control Center (downloadable as standalone program from ATI webpage) and unchecking "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays" which was on by default. The "Alternate DVI operational mode" option seems to have no effect either way. I'm guessing "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 50 Hz or something, and "Aleternate DVI operational mode" is the reduced blanking time, but who knows with ATI's ambiguous descriptions. In any case it's interesting that the fixes mentioned on this page actually cause trouble on the NEC display, while taking away the "fixes" makes the problem go away.

--Aeyea

It's interesting, indeed, since it's quite illogical. Did you try the newest official IBM drivers? They worked out of the box for me and at least one other person. On a T41p with a NEC 2180UX that is. I think the "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 60 Hz, which is supposed to be ideal for DVI TFTs, but that may in fact vary.

[[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 01:43, 27 Oct 2005 (CEST)

I haven't, as far as I know, tried the newest IBM drivers for the Radeon X300 - dated 2005-02-11 on Lenovo's website. I just did an install of ATI Catalyst 5.11 with the included control center. This installation actually requires a hack (http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/) for mobile devices. But in any case, the NEC LCD200VX still requires "Reduce DVI Frequency" to be unchecked in the ATI Control Center to avoid artifacts and instability. I would guess that the IBM drives also have this option enabled by default, so probably they would not work on this particular display without changing the settings, but I don't know for sure. I did take a look at the monitor's OSD info. In both cases, with and without "reduce DVI frequency" checked the OSD reports running at 1600x1200 at 75kHz horiz, 60Hz vertical. I'd really like to know what this setting does, then.

--[[User:Aeyea|Aeyea]] 21:07, 15 Nov 2005 (CET)

Funny thing I just discovered that having the option "Alternate DVI operational mode" enabled causes small artifacts on the NEC screen. These are little red and blue pixels or clusters of pixels that light up here and there - most visible on a totally black screen. So enabling the "Reduce DVI frequency" option causes screen blanking in and out (very disturbing), and enabling "Alternate DVI operational mode" causes small artifacts (almost unnoticeable).

--[[User:Aeyea|Aeyea]] 17:10, 16 Nov 2005 (CET)

----

== Single-link DVI ==

No thinkpads are currently capable of supporting dual-link DVI natively.

Single link is limited to 165MHz, while dual link has double that.

1600x1200x60=115200000Hz or 115.2MHz (assuming no blanking space), so in theory that should not be a problem, but in practice there might be additional limitations, such as the quality of the video controller and the passthrough to the dock or port replicator.

The IBM video drivers have always limited DVI output to 1280x1024, probably due to these issues.
Some people have had success hacking the drivers (or using alternative drivers), and going up to 1920x1200, but other people get corruption already at 1600x1200.

1920x1200x60=138240000Hz or 138.24MHz

== X40? ==
The article says the X40 is affected by this issue---how is that? Are there any X40 docs or adapters that give the X40 DVI capability at all?
----
Right, removed them from the listing. [[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 22:08, 25 Sep 2005 (CEST)
----

== List of affected models is totally incorrect ==

Just because a ThinkPad is compatible with a Dock or Port Replicator that has a DVI port, does not mean you can actually use it.

For example, NONE of the T2x or X series ThinkPads can do DVI, and there are probably others.

--[[User:Tonko|Tonko]] 02:04, 26 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Talk:Problem with DVI throughput

2005-11-16T16:10:52Z

Aeyea:

Here's some information I found:

Most DVI devices today use single-link DVI which supports a maximum bandwidth of 165 MHz [http://www.ddwg.org/dvi.html]. I suppose that ThinkPads provide a single-link DVI signal.

To calculate the bandwidth of your signal, in theory you just need to multiply the resolution with the vertical frequency. For example: 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz => 1600*1200*85 Hz = 163 MHz. This looks good, but it is outside the specs - because you need to take into account some extra time. CRTs need a so-called ''blanking time'' between the data for two display lines. This time is needed for something similar to a carriage return on a typewriter: The electron beam needs to be returned to the start of the next line. Additionally, some extra time is needed to transmit information about the border area around the real picture. About 25% of the bandwidth is used for these additional data. [http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041129/tft_connection-04.html]

This means, that there is no specific ThinkPad problem with the throughput - you are just trying to transfer video data at a rate that is outside the specs of DVI. Maybe the DVI transmitter inside the ThinkPad even works at this data rate. But the DVI receiver inside the monitor might be "overclocked".

TFTs don't really need extra time. So there is a chance of writing a display driver with a reduced blanking time. This might explain, why some people were successful with other drivers.

The effective maximum resolution for single link DVI should be around 1600x1200 @ 65 Hz, or @ 60 Hz to be on the sure side. Has anyone solved his problems by lowering the vertical frequency?

--[[User:137.226.40.2|137.226.40.2]] 14:23, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

== No problem on T41p ==

I have a T41p with 1400x1040 LCD and a Samsung SyncMaster 213T connected through the Port Replicator II with DVI 
After some windows registry hacks I can run the Samsung in 1600x1200 in single, clone display and extend display mode. 
Linux requires no such hacks and will happily run at 1600x1200

The picture through DVI is perfect with either desktop applications or running DVD video.

----
This is good news.
Do you run Linux in DualHead, MergedFB or CloneMode?
In Windows you have a clear video overlay all the time (like after every boot)?
Which drivers are you using in Linux and Windows, please list the with version numbers.

[[User:217.230.177.126|217.230.177.126]] 01:31, 10 Mar 2005 (CET)
----

==Question about DVI/LCD switching on T4x / Radeon M9 / Linux==
Has anyone been able to successfully switch back and forth between the LCD output and the Port Replicator II DVI output on Linux? How do you do it? My problem is described below:

[[http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-320973-highlight-.html]]

== No problems here ==

I installed the new catalyst drivers 5.6 using Patje's Mobility Moddingand it works for all resolutions. My laptop runs at 1400x1060 and my dvi screen at 1920x1200.
No problems that I can tell. The omega drivers (based on older catalyst drivers) blue screened my windows xp on boot.
----
Thanks for the info, it is a while since i tested with Catalyst and back then it didn't allow 1400x1050.

== Corruption and Flickering on T43 ==

No problems changing to 1600x1200 @60Hz on DVI passthrough using stock ATI drivers (6.14.10) and IBM presentation director on T43 and port replicator II. However the image is not stable - green dot artifacts flicker in approximately horizontal lines, while the screen blanks in and out. Completely stable at 1280x1024. Changing to the Omega drivers did not help at all. Also replacing ATI with Omega drivers somehow removed the presentation director key binding Fn-F7 and I had to reinstall it to get it back. Monitor is NEC AccuSync 200VX. Tried what appeared to be both single and dual-link DVI cables (not sure about monitor or port replicator support for dual-link).

I just tried the same setup while replacing the NEC monitor with a Planar PL2010M. The Planar LCD gives a completely stable image at 1600x1200.

UPDATE: I was able to get a stable 1600x1200 image on the NEC panel by going into the ATI Catalyst Control Center (downloadable as standalone program from ATI webpage) and unchecking "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays" which was on by default. The "Alternate DVI operational mode" option seems to have no effect either way. I'm guessing "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 50 Hz or something, and "Aleternate DVI operational mode" is the reduced blanking time, but who knows with ATI's ambiguous descriptions. In any case it's interesting that the fixes mentioned on this page actually cause trouble on the NEC display, while taking away the "fixes" makes the problem go away.

It's interesting, indeed, since it's quite illogical. Did you try the newest official IBM drivers? They worked out of the box for me and at least one other person. On a T41p with a NEC 2180UX that is. I think the "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 60 Hz, which is supposed to be ideal for DVI TFTs, but that may in fact vary.

[[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 01:43, 27 Oct 2005 (CEST)

I haven't, as far as I know, tried the newest IBM drivers for the Radeon X300 - dated 2005-02-11 on Lenovo's website. I just did an install of ATI Catalyst 5.11 with the included control center. This installation actually requires a hack (http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/) for mobile devices. But in any case, the NEC LCD200VX still requires "Reduce DVI Frequency" to be unchecked in the ATI Control Center to avoid artifacts and instability. I would guess that the IBM drives also have this option enabled by default, so probably they would not work on this particular display without changing the settings, but I don't know for sure. I did take a look at the monitor's OSD info. In both cases, with and without "reduce DVI frequency" checked the OSD reports running at 1600x1200 at 75kHz horiz, 60Hz vertical. I'd really like to know what this setting does, then.

--[[User:Aeyea|Aeyea]] 21:07, 15 Nov 2005 (CET)

Funny thing I just discovered that having the option "Alternate DVI operational mode" enabled causes small artifacts on the NEC screen. These are little red and blue pixels or clusters of pixels that light up here and there - most visible on a totally black screen. So enabling the "Reduce DVI frequency" option causes screen blanking in and out (very disturbing), and enabling "Alternate DVI operational mode" causes small artifacts (almost unnoticeable).

--[[User:Aeyea|Aeyea]] 17:10, 16 Nov 2005 (CET)

----

== Single-link DVI ==

No thinkpads are currently capable of supporting dual-link DVI natively.

Single link is limited to 165MHz, while dual link has double that.

1600x1200x60=115200000Hz or 115.2MHz (assuming no blanking space), so in theory that should not be a problem, but in practice there might be additional limitations, such as the quality of the video controller and the passthrough to the dock or port replicator.

The IBM video drivers have always limited DVI output to 1280x1024, probably due to these issues.
Some people have had success hacking the drivers (or using alternative drivers), and going up to 1920x1200, but other people get corruption already at 1600x1200.

1920x1200x60=138240000Hz or 138.24MHz

== X40? ==
The article says the X40 is affected by this issue---how is that? Are there any X40 docs or adapters that give the X40 DVI capability at all?
----
Right, removed them from the listing. [[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 22:08, 25 Sep 2005 (CEST)
----

== List of affected models is totally incorrect ==

Just because a ThinkPad is compatible with a Dock or Port Replicator that has a DVI port, does not mean you can actually use it.

For example, NONE of the T2x or X series ThinkPads can do DVI, and there are probably others.

--[[User:Tonko|Tonko]] 02:04, 26 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Talk:Problem with DVI throughput

2005-11-15T20:09:29Z

Aeyea: /* Corruption and Flickering on T43 */

Here's some information I found:

Most DVI devices today use single-link DVI which supports a maximum bandwidth of 165 MHz [http://www.ddwg.org/dvi.html]. I suppose that ThinkPads provide a single-link DVI signal.

To calculate the bandwidth of your signal, in theory you just need to multiply the resolution with the vertical frequency. For example: 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz => 1600*1200*85 Hz = 163 MHz. This looks good, but it is outside the specs - because you need to take into account some extra time. CRTs need a so-called ''blanking time'' between the data for two display lines. This time is needed for something similar to a carriage return on a typewriter: The electron beam needs to be returned to the start of the next line. Additionally, some extra time is needed to transmit information about the border area around the real picture. About 25% of the bandwidth is used for these additional data. [http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041129/tft_connection-04.html]

This means, that there is no specific ThinkPad problem with the throughput - you are just trying to transfer video data at a rate that is outside the specs of DVI. Maybe the DVI transmitter inside the ThinkPad even works at this data rate. But the DVI receiver inside the monitor might be "overclocked".

TFTs don't really need extra time. So there is a chance of writing a display driver with a reduced blanking time. This might explain, why some people were successful with other drivers.

The effective maximum resolution for single link DVI should be around 1600x1200 @ 65 Hz, or @ 60 Hz to be on the sure side. Has anyone solved his problems by lowering the vertical frequency?

--[[User:137.226.40.2|137.226.40.2]] 14:23, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

== No problem on T41p ==

I have a T41p with 1400x1040 LCD and a Samsung SyncMaster 213T connected through the Port Replicator II with DVI 
After some windows registry hacks I can run the Samsung in 1600x1200 in single, clone display and extend display mode. 
Linux requires no such hacks and will happily run at 1600x1200

The picture through DVI is perfect with either desktop applications or running DVD video.

----
This is good news.
Do you run Linux in DualHead, MergedFB or CloneMode?
In Windows you have a clear video overlay all the time (like after every boot)?
Which drivers are you using in Linux and Windows, please list the with version numbers.

[[User:217.230.177.126|217.230.177.126]] 01:31, 10 Mar 2005 (CET)
----

==Question about DVI/LCD switching on T4x / Radeon M9 / Linux==
Has anyone been able to successfully switch back and forth between the LCD output and the Port Replicator II DVI output on Linux? How do you do it? My problem is described below:

[[http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-320973-highlight-.html]]

== No problems here ==

I installed the new catalyst drivers 5.6 using Patje's Mobility Moddingand it works for all resolutions. My laptop runs at 1400x1060 and my dvi screen at 1920x1200.
No problems that I can tell. The omega drivers (based on older catalyst drivers) blue screened my windows xp on boot.
----
Thanks for the info, it is a while since i tested with Catalyst and back then it didn't allow 1400x1050.

== Corruption and Flickering on T43 ==

No problems changing to 1600x1200 @60Hz on DVI passthrough using stock ATI drivers (6.14.10) and IBM presentation director on T43 and port replicator II. However the image is not stable - green dot artifacts flicker in approximately horizontal lines, while the screen blanks in and out. Completely stable at 1280x1024. Changing to the Omega drivers did not help at all. Also replacing ATI with Omega drivers somehow removed the presentation director key binding Fn-F7 and I had to reinstall it to get it back. Monitor is NEC AccuSync 200VX. Tried what appeared to be both single and dual-link DVI cables (not sure about monitor or port replicator support for dual-link).

I just tried the same setup while replacing the NEC monitor with a Planar PL2010M. The Planar LCD gives a completely stable image at 1600x1200.

UPDATE: I was able to get a stable 1600x1200 image on the NEC panel by going into the ATI Catalyst Control Center (downloadable as standalone program from ATI webpage) and unchecking "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays" which was on by default. The "Alternate DVI operational mode" option seems to have no effect either way. I'm guessing "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 50 Hz or something, and "Aleternate DVI operational mode" is the reduced blanking time, but who knows with ATI's ambiguous descriptions. In any case it's interesting that the fixes mentioned on this page actually cause trouble on the NEC display, while taking away the "fixes" makes the problem go away.

It's interesting, indeed, since it's quite illogical. Did you try the newest official IBM drivers? They worked out of the box for me and at least one other person. On a T41p with a NEC 2180UX that is. I think the "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 60 Hz, which is supposed to be ideal for DVI TFTs, but that may in fact vary.

[[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 01:43, 27 Oct 2005 (CEST)

I haven't, as far as I know, tried the newest IBM drivers for the Radeon X300 - dated 2005-02-11 on Lenovo's website. I just did an install of ATI Catalyst 5.11 with the included control center. This installation actually requires a hack (http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/) for mobile devices. But in any case, the NEC LCD200VX still requires "Reduce DVI Frequency" to be unchecked in the ATI Control Center to avoid artifacts and instability. I would guess that the IBM drives also have this option enabled by default, so probably they would not work on this particular display without changing the settings, but I don't know for sure. I did take a look at the monitor's OSD info. In both cases, with and without "reduce DVI frequency" checked the OSD reports running at 1600x1200 at 75kHz horiz, 60Hz vertical. I'd really like to know what this setting does, then.

--[[User:Aeyea|Aeyea]] 21:07, 15 Nov 2005 (CET)

----

== Single-link DVI ==

No thinkpads are currently capable of supporting dual-link DVI natively.

Single link is limited to 165MHz, while dual link has double that.

1600x1200x60=115200000Hz or 115.2MHz (assuming no blanking space), so in theory that should not be a problem, but in practice there might be additional limitations, such as the quality of the video controller and the passthrough to the dock or port replicator.

The IBM video drivers have always limited DVI output to 1280x1024, probably due to these issues.
Some people have had success hacking the drivers (or using alternative drivers), and going up to 1920x1200, but other people get corruption already at 1600x1200.

1920x1200x60=138240000Hz or 138.24MHz

== X40? ==
The article says the X40 is affected by this issue---how is that? Are there any X40 docs or adapters that give the X40 DVI capability at all?
----
Right, removed them from the listing. [[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 22:08, 25 Sep 2005 (CEST)
----

== List of affected models is totally incorrect ==

Just because a ThinkPad is compatible with a Dock or Port Replicator that has a DVI port, does not mean you can actually use it.

For example, NONE of the T2x or X series ThinkPads can do DVI, and there are probably others.

--[[User:Tonko|Tonko]] 02:04, 26 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Talk:Problem with DVI throughput

2005-11-15T20:07:19Z

Aeyea:

Here's some information I found:

Most DVI devices today use single-link DVI which supports a maximum bandwidth of 165 MHz [http://www.ddwg.org/dvi.html]. I suppose that ThinkPads provide a single-link DVI signal.

To calculate the bandwidth of your signal, in theory you just need to multiply the resolution with the vertical frequency. For example: 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz => 1600*1200*85 Hz = 163 MHz. This looks good, but it is outside the specs - because you need to take into account some extra time. CRTs need a so-called ''blanking time'' between the data for two display lines. This time is needed for something similar to a carriage return on a typewriter: The electron beam needs to be returned to the start of the next line. Additionally, some extra time is needed to transmit information about the border area around the real picture. About 25% of the bandwidth is used for these additional data. [http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041129/tft_connection-04.html]

This means, that there is no specific ThinkPad problem with the throughput - you are just trying to transfer video data at a rate that is outside the specs of DVI. Maybe the DVI transmitter inside the ThinkPad even works at this data rate. But the DVI receiver inside the monitor might be "overclocked".

TFTs don't really need extra time. So there is a chance of writing a display driver with a reduced blanking time. This might explain, why some people were successful with other drivers.

The effective maximum resolution for single link DVI should be around 1600x1200 @ 65 Hz, or @ 60 Hz to be on the sure side. Has anyone solved his problems by lowering the vertical frequency?

--[[User:137.226.40.2|137.226.40.2]] 14:23, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

== No problem on T41p ==

I have a T41p with 1400x1040 LCD and a Samsung SyncMaster 213T connected through the Port Replicator II with DVI 
After some windows registry hacks I can run the Samsung in 1600x1200 in single, clone display and extend display mode. 
Linux requires no such hacks and will happily run at 1600x1200

The picture through DVI is perfect with either desktop applications or running DVD video.

----
This is good news.
Do you run Linux in DualHead, MergedFB or CloneMode?
In Windows you have a clear video overlay all the time (like after every boot)?
Which drivers are you using in Linux and Windows, please list the with version numbers.

[[User:217.230.177.126|217.230.177.126]] 01:31, 10 Mar 2005 (CET)
----

==Question about DVI/LCD switching on T4x / Radeon M9 / Linux==
Has anyone been able to successfully switch back and forth between the LCD output and the Port Replicator II DVI output on Linux? How do you do it? My problem is described below:

[[http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-320973-highlight-.html]]

== No problems here ==

I installed the new catalyst drivers 5.6 using Patje's Mobility Moddingand it works for all resolutions. My laptop runs at 1400x1060 and my dvi screen at 1920x1200.
No problems that I can tell. The omega drivers (based on older catalyst drivers) blue screened my windows xp on boot.
----
Thanks for the info, it is a while since i tested with Catalyst and back then it didn't allow 1400x1050.

== Corruption and Flickering on T43 ==

No problems changing to 1600x1200 @60Hz on DVI passthrough using stock ATI drivers (6.14.10) and IBM presentation director on T43 and port replicator II. However the image is not stable - green dot artifacts flicker in approximately horizontal lines, while the screen blanks in and out. Completely stable at 1280x1024. Changing to the Omega drivers did not help at all. Also replacing ATI with Omega drivers somehow removed the presentation director key binding Fn-F7 and I had to reinstall it to get it back. Monitor is NEC AccuSync 200VX. Tried what appeared to be both single and dual-link DVI cables (not sure about monitor or port replicator support for dual-link).

I just tried the same setup while replacing the NEC monitor with a Planar PL2010M. The Planar LCD gives a completely stable image at 1600x1200.

UPDATE: I was able to get a stable 1600x1200 image on the NEC panel by going into the ATI Catalyst Control Center (downloadable as standalone program from ATI webpage) and unchecking "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays" which was on by default. The "Alternate DVI operational mode" option seems to have no effect either way. I'm guessing "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 50 Hz or something, and "Aleternate DVI operational mode" is the reduced blanking time, but who knows with ATI's ambiguous descriptions. In any case it's interesting that the fixes mentioned on this page actually cause trouble on the NEC display, while taking away the "fixes" makes the problem go away.

It's interesting, indeed, since it's quite illogical. Did you try the newest official IBM drivers? They worked out of the box for me and at least one other person. On a T41p with a NEC 2180UX that is. I think the "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 60 Hz, which is supposed to be ideal for DVI TFTs, but that may in fact vary.

[[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 01:43, 27 Oct 2005 (CEST)

I haven't, as far as I know, tried the newest IBM drivers for the Radeon X300 - dated 2005-02-11 on Lenovo's website. I just did an install of ATI Catalyst 5.11 with the included control center. This installation actually requires a hack (http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/) for mobile devices. But in any case, the NEC LCD200VX still requires "Reduce DVI Frequency" to be unchecked in the ATI Control Center to avoid artifacts and instability. I would guess that the IBM drives also have this option enabled by default, so probably they would not work on this particular display without changing the settings, but I don't know for sure. I did take a look at the monitor's OSD info. In both cases, with and without "reduce DVI frequency" checked the OSD reports running at 1600x1200 at 75Hz horiz, 60Hz vertical. I'd really like to know what this setting does, then.

--[[User:Aeyea|Aeyea]] 21:07, 15 Nov 2005 (CET)

----

== Single-link DVI ==

No thinkpads are currently capable of supporting dual-link DVI natively.

Single link is limited to 165MHz, while dual link has double that.

1600x1200x60=115200000Hz or 115.2MHz (assuming no blanking space), so in theory that should not be a problem, but in practice there might be additional limitations, such as the quality of the video controller and the passthrough to the dock or port replicator.

The IBM video drivers have always limited DVI output to 1280x1024, probably due to these issues.
Some people have had success hacking the drivers (or using alternative drivers), and going up to 1920x1200, but other people get corruption already at 1600x1200.

1920x1200x60=138240000Hz or 138.24MHz

== X40? ==
The article says the X40 is affected by this issue---how is that? Are there any X40 docs or adapters that give the X40 DVI capability at all?
----
Right, removed them from the listing. [[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 22:08, 25 Sep 2005 (CEST)
----

== List of affected models is totally incorrect ==

Just because a ThinkPad is compatible with a Dock or Port Replicator that has a DVI port, does not mean you can actually use it.

For example, NONE of the T2x or X series ThinkPads can do DVI, and there are probably others.

--[[User:Tonko|Tonko]] 02:04, 26 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Talk:Problem with DVI throughput

2005-10-26T23:23:27Z

Aeyea: /* Corruption and Flickering on T43 */

Here's some information I found:

Most DVI devices today use single-link DVI which supports a maximum bandwidth of 165 MHz [http://www.ddwg.org/dvi.html]. I suppose that ThinkPads provide a single-link DVI signal.

To calculate the bandwidth of your signal, in theory you just need to multiply the resolution with the vertical frequency. For example: 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz => 1600*1200*85 Hz = 163 MHz. This looks good, but it is outside the specs - because you need to take into account some extra time. CRTs need a so-called ''blanking time'' between the data for two display lines. This time is needed for something similar to a carriage return on a typewriter: The electron beam needs to be returned to the start of the next line. Additionally, some extra time is needed to transmit information about the border area around the real picture. About 25% of the bandwidth is used for these additional data. [http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041129/tft_connection-04.html]

This means, that there is no specific ThinkPad problem with the throughput - you are just trying to transfer video data at a rate that is outside the specs of DVI. Maybe the DVI transmitter inside the ThinkPad even works at this data rate. But the DVI receiver inside the monitor might be "overclocked".

TFTs don't really need extra time. So there is a chance of writing a display driver with a reduced blanking time. This might explain, why some people were successful with other drivers.

The effective maximum resolution for single link DVI should be around 1600x1200 @ 65 Hz, or @ 60 Hz to be on the sure side. Has anyone solved his problems by lowering the vertical frequency?

--[[User:137.226.40.2|137.226.40.2]] 14:23, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

== No problem on T41p ==

I have a T41p with 1400x1040 LCD and a Samsung SyncMaster 213T connected through the Port Replicator II with DVI 
After some windows registry hacks I can run the Samsung in 1600x1200 in single, clone display and extend display mode. 
Linux requires no such hacks and will happily run at 1600x1200

The picture through DVI is perfect with either desktop applications or running DVD video.

----
This is good news.
Do you run Linux in DualHead, MergedFB or CloneMode?
In Windows you have a clear video overlay all the time (like after every boot)?
Which drivers are you using in Linux and Windows, please list the with version numbers.

[[User:217.230.177.126|217.230.177.126]] 01:31, 10 Mar 2005 (CET)
----

==Question about DVI/LCD switching on T4x / Radeon M9 / Linux==
Has anyone been able to successfully switch back and forth between the LCD output and the Port Replicator II DVI output on Linux? How do you do it? My problem is described below:

[[http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-320973-highlight-.html]]

== No problems here ==

I installed the new catalyst drivers 5.6 using Patje's Mobility Moddingand it works for all resolutions. My laptop runs at 1400x1060 and my dvi screen at 1920x1200.
No problems that I can tell. The omega drivers (based on older catalyst drivers) blue screened my windows xp on boot.
----
Thanks for the info, it is a while since i tested with Catalyst and back then it didn't allow 1400x1050.

== Corruption and Flickering on T43 ==

No problems changing to 1600x1200 @60Hz on DVI passthrough using stock ATI drivers (6.14.10) and IBM presentation director on T43 and port replicator II. However the image is not stable - green dot artifacts flicker in approximately horizontal lines, while the screen blanks in and out. Completely stable at 1280x1024. Changing to the Omega drivers did not help at all. Also replacing ATI with Omega drivers somehow removed the presentation director key binding Fn-F7 and I had to reinstall it to get it back. Monitor is NEC AccuSync 200VX. Tried what appeared to be both single and dual-link DVI cables (not sure about monitor or port replicator support for dual-link).

I just tried the same setup while replacing the NEC monitor with a Planar PL2010M. The Planar LCD gives a completely stable image at 1600x1200.

UPDATE: I was able to get a stable 1600x1200 image on the NEC panel by going into the ATI Catalyst Control Center (downloadable as standalone program from ATI webpage) and unchecking "Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays" which was on by default. The "Alternate DVI operational mode" option seems to have no effect either way. I'm guessing "Reduce DVI frequency" changes to 50 Hz or something, and "Aleternate DVI operational mode" is the reduced blanking time, but who knows with ATI's ambiguous descriptions. In any case it's interesting that the fixes mentioned on this page actually cause trouble on the NEC display, while taking away the "fixes" makes the problem go away.

== Single-link DVI ==

No thinkpads are currently capable of supporting dual-link DVI natively.

Single link is limited to 165MHz, while dual link has double that.

1600x1200x60=115200000Hz or 115.2MHz (assuming no blanking space), so in theory that should not be a problem, but in practice there might be additional limitations, such as the quality of the video controller and the passthrough to the dock or port replicator.

The IBM video drivers have always limited DVI output to 1280x1024, probably due to these issues.
Some people have had success hacking the drivers (or using alternative drivers), and going up to 1920x1200, but other people get corruption already at 1600x1200.

1920x1200x60=138240000Hz or 138.24MHz

== X40? ==
The article says the X40 is affected by this issue---how is that? Are there any X40 docs or adapters that give the X40 DVI capability at all?
----
Right, removed them from the listing. [[User:Wyrfel|Wyrfel]] 22:08, 25 Sep 2005 (CEST)
----

== List of affected models is totally incorrect ==

Just because a ThinkPad is compatible with a Dock or Port Replicator that has a DVI port, does not mean you can actually use it.

For example, NONE of the T2x or X series ThinkPads can do DVI, and there are probably others.

--[[User:Tonko|Tonko]] 02:04, 26 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Talk:Problem with DVI throughput

2005-08-23T23:45:45Z

Aeyea:

Talk:Problem with DVI throughput

2005-08-23T22:58:51Z

Aeyea:

Installing Debian Sid (June 2005) on a ThinkPad T43

2005-07-12T19:49:47Z

Aeyea: /* Choosing a kernel */

__TOC__

Please update with any contextual or cosmetic changes you feel appropriate.

June 30, 2005: Installing Debian/Sid (Unstable) on the T43 proved to be a very long process. Support for the relatively new machine should get much better over time, perhaps making much of this guide unnecessary. A great deal of useful information can be found in the T43 Category hardware page, and the other T-Series installation guides over on the Debian Category page.

==Installation==
===Partitioning the hard drive===
The thinkpad comes with Windows XP preinstalled but not set up. If you want to keep Windows it may be a good idea to turn on the machine and let it go through the Windows setup process before shrinking the partition. One step of the process is to convert the FAT32 windows parition to NTFS. The FAT32 partition may be easier to resize, but ntfsresize in Linux works fine too. For easy resizing, boot up in Knoppix 3.9+ with kernel 2.6 (earlier versions of Knoppix do not contain a 2.6 Kernel capable of handling the SATA drive). Once Knoppix is loaded head over to K->System->QtParted and you will be presented with a nice GUI for resizing the Windows partition. The Windows NTFS and IBM system restore FAT32 partitions take up 2/4 primary paritions, which doesn't leave much room for expansion. Between QtParted and cfdisk I partitioned my hard drive as:

- sda1 Primary NTFS 20 GB
- sda3 Primary Linux (reiser4) 20 GB (/)
- Extended remaining space (~30GB)
|- sda5 Logical Linux (ext3) 256 MB (/boot)
|- sda6 Logical Linux (ext3) 30 GB (/storage)
- sda2 Primary FAT32 (system restore)

If I started over I would probably put everything in a single extended parition. The reiser4 root parition here causes a lot of trouble because of the lack of widespread reiser4 support. The strategy here is to install the base system on sda6, compile a kernel with reiser4 support, and move everything back over to sda3. Obviously this can be skipped if you want to stick with ext3 or something else. The ext3 boot partition is also necessary since GRUB does not support reiser4 easily. sda6 will eventually become a FAT32 parition to share data between Windows and Linux. In the beginning you may find it useful to have an extra copy of everything on sda6 to use as a fall back in case something goes wrong. Also a swap partition can be very useful if you want to be able to hibernate the system easily, or if you have less than 1GB of memory. The inside of the drive (last sectors) can be ~50% slower than the outside (first sectors), so put frequently accessed portions up front.
===Running the net install===
As of June, 2005, the net installer still ships with a 2.6.8 kernel that will not read the SATA drive. It will be necessary to boot with kernel 2.4 to install the system (using legacy IDE drivers without DMA support - slow but manageable). To get all the latest and greatest, edit /apt/sources.list by hand and put in:

- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

the experimental repository may be necessary since the packages in unstable don't always have their dependencies satisfied within unstable. Don't worry since experimental packages must be manually installed. There is no need to install extra stuff at this point (X, etc) as it all can be taken care of after the system is working.
===Choosing a kernel===
Debian strips the Broadcom Tigon3 driver out of their 2.6.11 kernels. Also the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200/2915 drivers are unavailable. You can try to go the [http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html Debian-way] and download the Debian source and non-free patches while using the Debian modules tools to add support for everything. I decided to go over to [http://www.kernel.org www.kernel.org] and get the latest mm kernel (2.6.12-mm2 at the time). Kernel building instructions are [http://kerneltrap.org/node/875 here]. I started with the original Debian 2.6.11-1 configuration file (found in /boot), and made the major changes:

* P4 optimizations
* Preemptible Kernel
* built-in support for ext2, ext3, reiser4 (comes with mm kernel)
* built-in relevant SCSI and SATA support (ata_piix)
* Broadcom tg3 and IPW2200 modules

Also a number of little things can be removed and customized ([http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/linux-2.6.12-mm2.config .config] file). If you like go ahead and "apt-get install ccache" then change "gcc" to "ccache gcc" and "g++" to "ccache g++" in the Makefile to speed up future compilations. While gcc 4.0 comes with Debian Unstable, you probably want to use gcc 3.3 (or 2.95 as some suggest). The config file also represents bootsplash 3.1.6 and a SATA ACPI suspend fix patches to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel (see sections below). The nice thing about built-in filesystem and SATA support is that we don't need an initrd.

Before you boot into a 2.6 kernel, go into "/etc/fstab" and change "hda" to "sda", etc since the SATA drives are handled through the SCSI drivers.

==Reiser4==
The mm patch will add reiser4 support to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel. The next step is to change the root filesystem. Assuming the everything is installed in the ext3 partition on /dev/sda6, the steps are:
# apt-get install reiser4progs
# mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda3
# boot into a [http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Reiser4_Enabled_Live_CD reiser4-enabled live-CD]
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda6; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6}}
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda3; mount -t reiser4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3}}
#*# {{cmdroot|cp -a /mnt/sda6/* /mnt/sda3/}}
# if you don't want to get a reiser4 live-CD, you can use a regular CD and copy all of /dev/sda6 into a subdirectory, boot back into /dev/sda6 and copy it back to /dev/sda3
# update the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst
==Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG==
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel comes with the ipw2200 driver, but you'll still need to download the firmware from [http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php here] and put it in /lib/firmware. Note that the driver in 2.6.12-mm2 is version 1.0.0 and does not use the latest firmware. Once the driver is set up, apt-get install wireless-tools, check "iwconfig", and if all is well set up /etc/network/interfaces accordingly.

==Bootsplash==
Here are some [http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/3124 instructions]. I've had no problems I could trace back to the radeon framebuffer device. vga=834 is for the 1400x1050 display. The bootsplash themes are accessible through the bootsplash.de debian archive, though I haven't yet found one for or adapted one to 1400x1050.
==ACPI==
===CPU frequency scaling===
First the relevant modules must be enabled in the kernel. Both the acpi-cpufreq and speedstep-centrino modules work to some extent, but I wasn't able to clock the CPU below 1.3 GHz with the speedstep-centrino module, while with acpi-cpufreq I had one non-reproduceable issue with the frequency being stuck at 800 MHz. You'll need to put the modules (acpi-cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand, cpufreq-conservative, cpufreq-powersave) in /etc/modules so that they are loaded at bootup. There are many ways to automatically manage frequency scaling behavior. I chose to use "cpufreqd" with this [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/cpufreqd.conf configuration], and there is also powernowd using the cpufreq-userspace governor, or writing your own ACPI event scripts.
===Suspend to RAM===
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel will crash on resume because there is no SATA support for suspend. There are patches at [[How to make ACPI work]] which need minimal [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/sata_pm.2.6.12-mm2.diff changes] to work with 2.6.12-mm2 (note: I have no idea what I'm doing but it seems to work). The video card does not wake up after resume, but the X.org radeon driver will reset the card properly. If you want to get the text consoles back, you'll either have to append "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" to the GRUB kernel arguments for a VGA display, or use vbetool to save/restore video bios state for a framebuffer device (not exactly stable on my machine).
===Suspend to disk (hibernate)===
Software suspend comes with the kernel, and swsusp2 looks really nice but messy to patch into 2.6.12-mm2 (didn't really try). Without a swap drive I went for neither since suspend to RAM only takes ~.5 W of power and is much faster. It would be nice to be able to hibernate, switch to windows, and come back. swsusp2 is supposed to be merged with the kernel at some point, so perhaps it's enough to wait for that.
===laptop-mode===
Laptop-mode is built into the kernel. To easily activate it, 'apt-get install powermgmt-base laptop-mode-tools'. It should help preserve battery life by minimizing hard-drive spin-up, though this depends on the SATA ACPI support.

==X==
===XFree86===
The radeon driver in the 4.3.0 XFree86 from Debian unstable is not new enough to support the Mobility X300. I tried the unofficial Debian [http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html fglrx] drivers, and with some suggestions from this [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335524 thread] was able to compile against 2.6.12-mm2, but ended up with a radeon driver which crashed my computer (maybe because I had DRI enabled in the kernel).
===X.org===
There are experimental X.org packages available [http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html here] which I am currently running with X300 support with the opensource drivers. I'm not really sure what I miss out on besides 3D acceleration by doing so.

Try setting in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Option "DynamicPM" "True"
which improves battery life considerably ([http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~vbraun/computing/T41/power.html see this page for details]).

[[Category:Debian]] [[Category:T43]]

Installing Debian Sid (June 2005) on a ThinkPad T43

2005-07-01T00:06:39Z

Aeyea: /* X.org */

__TOC__

Please update with any contextual or cosmetic changes you feel appropriate.

June 30, 2005: Installing Debian/Sid (Unstable) on the T43 proved to be a very long process. Support for the relatively new machine should get much better over time, perhaps making much of this guide unnecessary. A great deal of useful information can be found in the T43 Category hardware page, and the other T-Series installation guides over on the Debian Category page.

==Installation==
===Partitioning the hard drive===
The thinkpad comes with Windows XP preinstalled but not set up. If you want to keep Windows it may be a good idea to turn on the machine and let it go through the Windows setup process before shrinking the partition. One step of the process is to convert the FAT32 windows parition to NTFS. The FAT32 partition may be easier to resize, but ntfsresize in Linux works fine too. For easy resizing, boot up in Knoppix 3.9+ with kernel 2.6 (earlier versions of Knoppix do not contain a 2.6 Kernel capable of handling the SATA drive). Once Knoppix is loaded head over to K->System->QtParted and you will be presented with a nice GUI for resizing the Windows partition. The Windows NTFS and IBM system restore FAT32 partitions take up 2/4 primary paritions, which doesn't leave much room for expansion. Between QtParted and cfdisk I partitioned my hard drive as:

- sda1 Primary NTFS 20 GB
- sda3 Primary Linux (reiser4) 20 GB (/)
- Extended remaining space (~30GB)
|- sda5 Logical Linux (ext3) 256 MB (/boot)
|- sda6 Logical Linux (ext3) 30 GB (/storage)
- sda2 Primary FAT32 (system restore)

If I started over I would probably put everything in a single extended parition. The reiser4 root parition here causes a lot of trouble because of the lack of widespread reiser4 support. The strategy here is to install the base system on sda6, compile a kernel with reiser4 support, and move everything back over to sda3. Obviously this can be skipped if you want to stick with ext3 or something else. The ext3 boot partition is also necessary since GRUB does not support reiser4 easily. sda6 will eventually become a FAT32 parition to share data between Windows and Linux. In the beginning you may find it useful to have an extra copy of everything on sda6 to use as a fall back in case something goes wrong. Also a swap partition can be very useful if you want to be able to hibernate the system easily, or if you have less than 1GB of memory. The inside of the drive (last sectors) can be ~50% slower than the outside (first sectors), so put frequently accessed portions up front.
===Running the net install===
As of June, 2005, the net installer still ships with a 2.6.8 kernel that will not read the SATA drive. It will be necessary to boot with kernel 2.4 to install the system (using legacy IDE drivers without DMA support - slow but manageable). To get all the latest and greatest, edit /apt/sources.list by hand and put in:

- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

the experimental repository may be necessary since the packages in unstable don't always have their dependencies satisfied within unstable. Don't worry since experimental packages must be manually installed. There is no need to install extra stuff at this point (X, etc) as it all can be taken care of after the system is working.
===Choosing a kernel===
Debian strips the Broadcom Tigon3 driver out of their 2.6.11 kernels. Also the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200/2915 drivers are unavailable. You can try to go the [http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html Debian-way] and download the Debian source and non-free patches while using the Debian modules tools to add support for everything. I decided to go over to [http://www.kernel.org www.kernel.org] and get the latest mm kernel (2.6.12-mm2 at the time). Kernel building instructions are [http://kerneltrap.org/node/875 here]. I started with the original Debian 2.6.11-1 configuration file (found in /boot), and made the major changes:

* P4 optimizations
* Preemptible Kernel
* built-in support for ext2, ext3, reiser4 (comes with mm kernel)
* built-in relevant SCSI and SATA support (ata_piix)
* Broadcom tg3 and IPW2200 modules

Also a number of little things can be removed and customized ([http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/linux-2.6.12-mm2.config .config] file). If you like go ahead and "apt-get ccache" then change "gcc" to "ccache gcc" and "g++" to "ccache g++" in the Makefile to speed up future compilations. The config file also represents bootsplash 3.1.6 and a SATA ACPI suspend fix patches to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel (see sections below). The nice thing about built-in filesystem and SATA support is that we don't need an initrd.

Before you boot into a 2.6 kernel, go into "/etc/fstab" and change "hda" to "sda", etc since the SATA drives are handled through the SCSI drivers.
==Reiser4==
The mm patch will add reiser4 support to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel. The next step is to change the root filesystem. Assuming the everything is installed in the ext3 partition on /dev/sda6, the steps are:
# apt-get install reiser4progs
# mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda3
# boot into a [http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Reiser4_Enabled_Live_CD reiser4-enabled live-CD]
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda6; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6}}
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda3; mount -t reiser4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3}}
#*# {{cmdroot|cp -a /mnt/sda6/* /mnt/sda3/}}
# if you don't want to get a reiser4 live-CD, you can use a regular CD and copy all of /dev/sda6 into a subdirectory, boot back into /dev/sda6 and copy it back to /dev/sda3
# update the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst
==Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG==
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel comes with the ipw2200 driver, but you'll still need to download the firmware from [http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php here] and put it in /lib/firmware. Note that the driver in 2.6.12-mm2 is version 1.0.0 and does not use the latest firmware. Once the driver is set up, apt-get install wireless-tools, check "iwconfig", and if all is well set up /etc/network/interfaces accordingly.

==Bootsplash==
Here are some [http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/3124 instructions]. I've had no problems I could trace back to the radeon framebuffer device. vga=834 is for the 1400x1050 display. The bootsplash themes are accessible through the bootsplash.de debian archive, though I haven't yet found one for or adapted one to 1400x1050.
==ACPI==
===CPU frequency scaling===
First the relevant modules must be enabled in the kernel. Both the acpi-cpufreq and speedstep-centrino modules work to some extent, but I wasn't able to clock the CPU below 1.3 GHz with the speedstep-centrino module, while with acpi-cpufreq I had one non-reproduceable issue with the frequency being stuck at 800 MHz. You'll need to put the modules (acpi-cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand, cpufreq-conservative, cpufreq-powersave) in /etc/modules so that they are loaded at bootup. There are many ways to automatically manage frequency scaling behavior. I chose to use "cpufreqd" with this [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/cpufreqd.conf configuration], and there is also powernowd using the cpufreq-userspace governor, or writing your own ACPI event scripts.
===Suspend to RAM===
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel will crash on resume because there is no SATA support for suspend. There are patches at [[How to make ACPI work]] which need minimal [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/sata_pm.2.6.12-mm2.diff changes] to work with 2.6.12-mm2 (note: I have no idea what I'm doing but it seems to work). The video card does not wake up after resume, but the X.org radeon driver will reset the card properly. If you want to get the text consoles back, you'll either have to append "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" to the GRUB kernel arguments for a VGA display, or use vbetool to save/restore video bios state for a framebuffer device (not exactly stable on my machine).
===Suspend to disk (hibernate)===
Software suspend comes with the kernel, and swsusp2 looks really nice but messy to patch into 2.6.12-mm2 (didn't really try). Without a swap drive I went for neither since suspend to RAM only takes ~.5 W of power and is much faster. It would be nice to be able to hibernate, switch to windows, and come back. swsusp2 is supposed to be merged with the kernel at some point, so perhaps it's enough to wait for that.
===laptop-mode===
Laptop-mode is built into the kernel. To easily activate it, 'apt-get powermgmt-base laptop-mode-tools'. It should help preserve battery life by minimizing hard-drive spin-up, though this depends on the SATA ACPI support.

==X==
===XFree86===
The radeon driver in the 4.3.0 XFree86 from Debian unstable is not new enough to support the Mobility X300. I tried the unofficial Debian [http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html fglrx] drivers, and with some suggestions from this [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335524 thread] was able to compile against 2.6.12-mm2, but ended up with a radeon driver which crashed my computer (maybe because I had DRI enabled in the kernel).
===X.org===
There are experimental X.org packages available [http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html here] which I am currently running with X300 support with the opensource drivers. I'm not really sure what I miss out on besides 3D acceleration by doing so.

Try setting in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Option "DynamicPM" "True"
which improves battery life considerably ([http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~vbraun/computing/T41/power.html see this page for details]).

[[Category:Debian]] [[Category:T43]]

Installing Debian Sid (June 2005) on a ThinkPad T43

2005-06-30T23:53:11Z

Aeyea: /* ACPI */

__TOC__

Please update with any contextual or cosmetic changes you feel appropriate.

June 30, 2005: Installing Debian/Sid (Unstable) on the T43 proved to be a very long process. Support for the relatively new machine should get much better over time, perhaps making much of this guide unnecessary. A great deal of useful information can be found in the T43 Category hardware page, and the other T-Series installation guides over on the Debian Category page.

==Installation==
===Partitioning the hard drive===
The thinkpad comes with Windows XP preinstalled but not set up. If you want to keep Windows it may be a good idea to turn on the machine and let it go through the Windows setup process before shrinking the partition. One step of the process is to convert the FAT32 windows parition to NTFS. The FAT32 partition may be easier to resize, but ntfsresize in Linux works fine too. For easy resizing, boot up in Knoppix 3.9+ with kernel 2.6 (earlier versions of Knoppix do not contain a 2.6 Kernel capable of handling the SATA drive). Once Knoppix is loaded head over to K->System->QtParted and you will be presented with a nice GUI for resizing the Windows partition. The Windows NTFS and IBM system restore FAT32 partitions take up 2/4 primary paritions, which doesn't leave much room for expansion. Between QtParted and cfdisk I partitioned my hard drive as:

- sda1 Primary NTFS 20 GB
- sda3 Primary Linux (reiser4) 20 GB (/)
- Extended remaining space (~30GB)
|- sda5 Logical Linux (ext3) 256 MB (/boot)
|- sda6 Logical Linux (ext3) 30 GB (/storage)
- sda2 Primary FAT32 (system restore)

If I started over I would probably put everything in a single extended parition. The reiser4 root parition here causes a lot of trouble because of the lack of widespread reiser4 support. The strategy here is to install the base system on sda6, compile a kernel with reiser4 support, and move everything back over to sda3. Obviously this can be skipped if you want to stick with ext3 or something else. The ext3 boot partition is also necessary since GRUB does not support reiser4 easily. sda6 will eventually become a FAT32 parition to share data between Windows and Linux. In the beginning you may find it useful to have an extra copy of everything on sda6 to use as a fall back in case something goes wrong. Also a swap partition can be very useful if you want to be able to hibernate the system easily, or if you have less than 1GB of memory. The inside of the drive (last sectors) can be ~50% slower than the outside (first sectors), so put frequently accessed portions up front.
===Running the net install===
As of June, 2005, the net installer still ships with a 2.6.8 kernel that will not read the SATA drive. It will be necessary to boot with kernel 2.4 to install the system (using legacy IDE drivers without DMA support - slow but manageable). To get all the latest and greatest, edit /apt/sources.list by hand and put in:

- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

the experimental repository may be necessary since the packages in unstable don't always have their dependencies satisfied within unstable. Don't worry since experimental packages must be manually installed. There is no need to install extra stuff at this point (X, etc) as it all can be taken care of after the system is working.
===Choosing a kernel===
Debian strips the Broadcom Tigon3 driver out of their 2.6.11 kernels. Also the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200/2915 drivers are unavailable. You can try to go the [http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html Debian-way] and download the Debian source and non-free patches while using the Debian modules tools to add support for everything. I decided to go over to [http://www.kernel.org www.kernel.org] and get the latest mm kernel (2.6.12-mm2 at the time). Kernel building instructions are [http://kerneltrap.org/node/875 here]. I started with the original Debian 2.6.11-1 configuration file (found in /boot), and made the major changes:

* P4 optimizations
* Preemptible Kernel
* built-in support for ext2, ext3, reiser4 (comes with mm kernel)
* built-in relevant SCSI and SATA support (ata_piix)
* Broadcom tg3 and IPW2200 modules

Also a number of little things can be removed and customized ([http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/linux-2.6.12-mm2.config .config] file). If you like go ahead and "apt-get ccache" then change "gcc" to "ccache gcc" and "g++" to "ccache g++" in the Makefile to speed up future compilations. The config file also represents bootsplash 3.1.6 and a SATA ACPI suspend fix patches to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel (see sections below). The nice thing about built-in filesystem and SATA support is that we don't need an initrd.

Before you boot into a 2.6 kernel, go into "/etc/fstab" and change "hda" to "sda", etc since the SATA drives are handled through the SCSI drivers.
==Reiser4==
The mm patch will add reiser4 support to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel. The next step is to change the root filesystem. Assuming the everything is installed in the ext3 partition on /dev/sda6, the steps are:
# apt-get install reiser4progs
# mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda3
# boot into a [http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Reiser4_Enabled_Live_CD reiser4-enabled live-CD]
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda6; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6}}
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda3; mount -t reiser4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3}}
#*# {{cmdroot|cp -a /mnt/sda6/* /mnt/sda3/}}
# if you don't want to get a reiser4 live-CD, you can use a regular CD and copy all of /dev/sda6 into a subdirectory, boot back into /dev/sda6 and copy it back to /dev/sda3
# update the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst
==Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG==
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel comes with the ipw2200 driver, but you'll still need to download the firmware from [http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php here] and put it in /lib/firmware. Note that the driver in 2.6.12-mm2 is version 1.0.0 and does not use the latest firmware. Once the driver is set up, apt-get install wireless-tools, check "iwconfig", and if all is well set up /etc/network/interfaces accordingly.

==Bootsplash==
Here are some [http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/3124 instructions]. I've had no problems I could trace back to the radeon framebuffer device. vga=834 is for the 1400x1050 display. The bootsplash themes are accessible through the bootsplash.de debian archive, though I haven't yet found one for or adapted one to 1400x1050.
==ACPI==
===CPU frequency scaling===
First the relevant modules must be enabled in the kernel. Both the acpi-cpufreq and speedstep-centrino modules work to some extent, but I wasn't able to clock the CPU below 1.3 GHz with the speedstep-centrino module, while with acpi-cpufreq I had one non-reproduceable issue with the frequency being stuck at 800 MHz. You'll need to put the modules (acpi-cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand, cpufreq-conservative, cpufreq-powersave) in /etc/modules so that they are loaded at bootup. There are many ways to automatically manage frequency scaling behavior. I chose to use "cpufreqd" with this [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/cpufreqd.conf configuration], and there is also powernowd using the cpufreq-userspace governor, or writing your own ACPI event scripts.
===Suspend to RAM===
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel will crash on resume because there is no SATA support for suspend. There are patches at [[How to make ACPI work]] which need minimal [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/sata_pm.2.6.12-mm2.diff changes] to work with 2.6.12-mm2 (note: I have no idea what I'm doing but it seems to work). The video card does not wake up after resume, but the X.org radeon driver will reset the card properly. If you want to get the text consoles back, you'll either have to append "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" to the GRUB kernel arguments for a VGA display, or use vbetool to save/restore video bios state for a framebuffer device (not exactly stable on my machine).
===Suspend to disk (hibernate)===
Software suspend comes with the kernel, and swsusp2 looks really nice but messy to patch into 2.6.12-mm2 (didn't really try). Without a swap drive I went for neither since suspend to RAM only takes ~.5 W of power and is much faster. It would be nice to be able to hibernate, switch to windows, and come back. swsusp2 is supposed to be merged with the kernel at some point, so perhaps it's enough to wait for that.
===laptop-mode===
Laptop-mode is built into the kernel. To easily activate it, 'apt-get powermgmt-base laptop-mode-tools'. It should help preserve battery life by minimizing hard-drive spin-up, though this depends on the SATA ACPI support.

==X==
===XFree86===
The radeon driver in the 4.3.0 XFree86 from Debian unstable is not new enough to support the Mobility X300. I tried the unofficial Debian [http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html fglrx] drivers, and with some suggestions from this [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335524 thread] was able to compile against 2.6.12-mm2, but ended up with a radeon driver which crashed my computer (maybe because I had DRI enabled in the kernel).
===X.org===
There are experimental X.org packages available [http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html here] which I am currently running with X300 support with the opensource drivers. I'm not really sure what I miss out on besides 3D acceleration by doing so.

[[Category:Debian]] [[Category:T43]]

Installing Debian Sid (June 2005) on a ThinkPad T43

2005-06-30T20:28:40Z

Aeyea:

__TOC__

Please update with any contextual or cosmetic changes you feel appropriate.

June 30, 2005: Installing Debian/Sid (Unstable) on the T43 proved to be a very long process. Support for the relatively new machine should get much better over time, perhaps making much of this guide unnecessary. A great deal of useful information can be found in the T43 Category hardware page, and the other T-Series installation guides over on the Debian Category page.

==Installation==
===Partitioning the hard drive===
The thinkpad comes with Windows XP preinstalled but not set up. If you want to keep Windows it may be a good idea to turn on the machine and let it go through the Windows setup process before shrinking the partition. One step of the process is to convert the FAT32 windows parition to NTFS. The FAT32 partition may be easier to resize, but ntfsresize in Linux works fine too. For easy resizing, boot up in Knoppix 3.9+ with kernel 2.6 (earlier versions of Knoppix do not contain a 2.6 Kernel capable of handling the SATA drive). Once Knoppix is loaded head over to K->System->QtParted and you will be presented with a nice GUI for resizing the Windows partition. The Windows NTFS and IBM system restore FAT32 partitions take up 2/4 primary paritions, which doesn't leave much room for expansion. Between QtParted and cfdisk I partitioned my hard drive as:

- sda1 Primary NTFS 20 GB
- sda3 Primary Linux (reiser4) 20 GB (/)
- Extended remaining space (~30GB)
|- sda5 Logical Linux (ext3) 256 MB (/boot)
|- sda6 Logical Linux (ext3) 30 GB (/storage)
- sda2 Primary FAT32 (system restore)

If I started over I would probably put everything in a single extended parition. The reiser4 root parition here causes a lot of trouble because of the lack of widespread reiser4 support. The strategy here is to install the base system on sda6, compile a kernel with reiser4 support, and move everything back over to sda3. Obviously this can be skipped if you want to stick with ext3 or something else. The ext3 boot partition is also necessary since GRUB does not support reiser4 easily. sda6 will eventually become a FAT32 parition to share data between Windows and Linux. In the beginning you may find it useful to have an extra copy of everything on sda6 to use as a fall back in case something goes wrong. Also a swap partition can be very useful if you want to be able to hibernate the system easily, or if you have less than 1GB of memory. The inside of the drive (last sectors) can be ~50% slower than the outside (first sectors), so put frequently accessed portions up front.
===Running the net install===
As of June, 2005, the net installer still ships with a 2.6.8 kernel that will not read the SATA drive. It will be necessary to boot with kernel 2.4 to install the system (using legacy IDE drivers without DMA support - slow but manageable). To get all the latest and greatest, edit /apt/sources.list by hand and put in:

- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

the experimental repository may be necessary since the packages in unstable don't always have their dependencies satisfied within unstable. Don't worry since experimental packages must be manually installed. There is no need to install extra stuff at this point (X, etc) as it all can be taken care of after the system is working.
===Choosing a kernel===
Debian strips the Broadcom Tigon3 driver out of their 2.6.11 kernels. Also the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200/2915 drivers are unavailable. You can try to go the [http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html Debian-way] and download the Debian source and non-free patches while using the Debian modules tools to add support for everything. I decided to go over to [http://www.kernel.org www.kernel.org] and get the latest mm kernel (2.6.12-mm2 at the time). Kernel building instructions are [http://kerneltrap.org/node/875 here]. I started with the original Debian 2.6.11-1 configuration file (found in /boot), and made the major changes:

* P4 optimizations
* Preemptible Kernel
* built-in support for ext2, ext3, reiser4 (comes with mm kernel)
* built-in relevant SCSI and SATA support (ata_piix)
* Broadcom tg3 and IPW2200 modules

Also a number of little things can be removed and customized ([http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/linux-2.6.12-mm2.config .config] file). If you like go ahead and "apt-get ccache" then change "gcc" to "ccache gcc" and "g++" to "ccache g++" in the Makefile to speed up future compilations. The config file also represents bootsplash 3.1.6 and a SATA ACPI suspend fix patches to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel (see sections below). The nice thing about built-in filesystem and SATA support is that we don't need an initrd.

Before you boot into a 2.6 kernel, go into "/etc/fstab" and change "hda" to "sda", etc since the SATA drives are handled through the SCSI drivers.
==Reiser4==
The mm patch will add reiser4 support to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel. The next step is to change the root filesystem. Assuming the everything is installed in the ext3 partition on /dev/sda6, the steps are:
# apt-get install reiser4progs
# mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda3
# boot into a [http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Reiser4_Enabled_Live_CD reiser4-enabled live-CD]
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda6; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6}}
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda3; mount -t reiser4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3}}
#*# {{cmdroot|cp -a /mnt/sda6/* /mnt/sda3/}}
# if you don't want to get a reiser4 live-CD, you can use a regular CD and copy all of /dev/sda6 into a subdirectory, boot back into /dev/sda6 and copy it back to /dev/sda3
# update the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst
==Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG==
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel comes with the ipw2200 driver, but you'll still need to download the firmware from [http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php here] and put it in /lib/firmware. Note that the driver in 2.6.12-mm2 is version 1.0.0 and does not use the latest firmware. One the driver is set up, apt-get install wireless-tools, check "iwconfig", and if all is well set up /etc/network/interfaces accordingly.
==Bootsplash==
Here are some [http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/3124 instructions]. I've had no problems I could trace back to the radeon framebuffer device. vga=834 is for the 1400x1050 display. The bootsplash themes are accessible through the bootsplash.de debian archive, though I haven't yet found one for or adapted one to 1400x1050.
==ACPI==
===CPU frequency scaling===
First the relevant modules must be enabled in the kernel. Both the acpi-cpufreq and speedstep-centrino modules work to some extent, but I wasn't able to clock the CPU below 1.3 GHz with the speedstep-centrino module, while with acpi-cpufreq I had one non-reproduceable issue with the frequency being stuck at 800 MHz. You'll need to put the modules (acpi-cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand, cpufreq-conservative, cpufreq-powersave) in /etc/modules so that they are loaded at bootup. There are many ways to automatically manage frequency scaling behavior. I chose to use "cpufreqd" with this [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/cpufreqd.conf configuration], and there is also powernowd using the cpufreq-userspace governor, or writing your own ACPI event scripts.
===Suspend to RAM===
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel will crash on resume because there is no SATA support for suspend. There are patches at [[How to make ACPI work]] which need minimal [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/sata_pm.2.6.12-mm2.diff changes] to work with 2.6.12-mm2 (note: I have no idea what I'm doing but it seems to work). The video card does not wake up after resume, but the X.org radeon driver will reset the card properly. If you want to get the text consoles back, you'll either have to append "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" to the GRUB kernel arguments for a VGA display, or use vbetool to save/restore video bios state for a framebuffer device (not exactly stable on my machine).
===Suspend to disk (hibernate)===
Software suspend comes with the kernel, and swsusp2 looks really nice but messy to patch into 2.6.12-mm2 (didn't really try). Without a swap drive I went for neither since suspend to RAM only takes ~.5 W of power and is much faster. It would be nice to be able to hibernate, switch to windows, and come back. swsusp2 is supposed to be merged with the kernel at some point, so perhaps it's enough to wait for that. Does anyone know how much power it takes to write and read 1 GB from disk, and how long one would need to hibernate vs. suspend to make up for the extra power?
==X==
===XFree86===
The radeon driver in the 4.3.0 XFree86 from Debian unstable is not new enough to support the Mobility X300. I tried the unofficial Debian [http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html fglrx] drivers, and with some suggestions from this [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335524 thread] was able to compile against 2.6.12-mm2, but ended up with a radeon driver which crashed my computer (maybe because I had DRI enabled in the kernel).
===X.org===
There are experimental X.org packages available [http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html here] which I am currently running with X300 support with the opensource drivers. I'm not really sure what I'm missing at this point.

[[Category:Debian]] [[Category:T43]]

Installing Debian Sid (June 2005) on a ThinkPad T43

2005-06-30T19:52:46Z

Aeyea: added categories

__TOC__

Please update with any contextual or cosmetic changes you feel appropriate.

June 30, 2005: Installing Debian/Sid (Unstable) on the T43 proved to be a very long process. Support for the relatively new machine should get much better over time, perhaps making much of this guide unnecessary. A great deal of useful information can be found in the T43 Category hardware page, and the other T-Series installation guides over on the Debian Category page.

==Installation==
===Partitioning the hard drive===
The thinkpad comes with Windows XP preinstalled but not set up. If you want to keep Windows it may be a good idea to turn on the machine and let it go through the Windows setup process before shrinking the partition. One step of the process is to convert the FAT32 windows parition to NTFS. The FAT32 partition may be easier to resize, but ntfsresize in Linux works fine too. For easy resizing, boot up in Knoppix 3.9+ with kernel 2.6 (earlier versions of Knoppix do not contain a 2.6 Kernel capable of handling the SATA drive). Once Knoppix is loaded head over to K->System->QtParted and you will be presented with a nice GUI for resizing the Windows partition. The Windows NTFS and IBM system restore FAT32 partitions take up 2/4 primary paritions, which doesn't leave much room for expansion. Between QtParted and cfdisk I partitioned my hard drive as:

- sda1 Primary NTFS 20 GB
- sda3 Primary Linux (reiser4) 20 GB (/)
- Extended remaining space (~30GB)
|- sda5 Logical Linux (ext3) 256 MB (/boot)
|- sda6 Logical Linux (ext3) 30 GB (/storage)
- sda2 Primary FAT32 (system restore)

If I started over I would probably put everything in a single extended parition. The reiser4 root parition here causes a lot of trouble because of the lack of widespread reiser4 support. The strategy here is to install the base system on sda6, compile a kernel with reiser4 support, and move everything back over to sda3. Obviously this can be skipped if you want to stick with ext3 or something else. The ext3 boot partition is also necessary since GRUB does not support reiser4 easily. sda6 will eventually become a FAT32 parition to share data between Windows and Linux. In the beginning you may find it useful to have an extra copy of everything on sda6 to use as a fall back in case something goes wrong. Also a swap partition can be very useful if you want to be able to hibernate the system easily, or if you have less than 1GB of memory. The inside of the drive (last sectors) can be ~50% slower than the outside (first sectors), so put frequently accessed portions up front.
===Running the net install===
As of June, 2005, the net installer still ships with a 2.6.8 kernel that will not read the SATA drive. It will be necessary to boot with kernel 2.4 to install the system (using legacy IDE drivers without DMA support - slow but manageable). To get all the latest and greatest, edit /apt/sources.list by hand and put in:

- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

the experimental repository may be necessary since the packages in unstable don't always have their dependencies satisfied within unstable. Don't worry since experimental packages must be manually installed. There is no need to install extra stuff at this point (X, etc) as it all can be taken care of after the system is working.
===Choosing a kernel===
Debian strips the Broadcom Tigon3 driver out of their 2.6.11 kernels. Also the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200/2915 drivers are unavailable. You can try to go the [http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html Debian-way] and download the Debian source and non-free patches while using the Debian modules tools to add support for everything. I decided to go over to [http://www.kernel.org www.kernel.org] and get the latest mm kernel (2.6.12-mm2 at the time). Kernel building instructions are [http://kerneltrap.org/node/875 here]. I started with the original Debian 2.6.11-1 configuration file (found in /boot), and made the major changes:

* P4 optimizations
* Preemptible Kernel
* built-in support for ext2, ext3, reiser4 (comes with mm kernel)
* built-in relevant SCSI and SATA support (ata_piix)
* Broadcom tg3 and IPW2200 modules

Also a number of little things can be removed and customized ([http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/linux-2.6.12-mm2.config .config] file). If you like go ahead and "apt-get ccache" then change "gcc" to "ccache gcc" and "g++" to "ccache g++" in the Makefile to speed up future compilations. The config file also represents bootsplash 3.1.6 and a SATA ACPI suspend fix patches to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel (see sections below). The nice thing about built-in filesystem and SATA support is that we don't need an initrd.

Before you boot into a 2.6 kernel, go into "/etc/fstab" and change "hda" to "sda", etc since the SATA drives are handled through the SCSI drivers.
==Reiser4==
The mm patch will add reiser4 support to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel. The next step is to change the root filesystem. Assuming the everything is installed in the ext3 partition on /dev/sda6, the steps are:
# apt-get install reiser4progs
# mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda3
# boot into a [http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Reiser4_Enabled_Live_CD reiser4-enabled live-CD]
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda6; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6}}
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda3; mount -t reiser4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3}}
#*# {{cmdroot|cp -a /mnt/sda6/* /mnt/sda3/}}
# if you don't want to get a reiser4 live-CD, you can use a regular CD and copy all of /dev/sda6 into a subdirectory, boot back into /dev/sda6 and copy it back to /dev/sda3
# update the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst
==Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG==
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel comes with the ipw2200 driver, but you'll still need to download the firmware from [http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php here] and put it in /lib/firmware. Note that the driver in 2.6.12-mm2 is version 1.0.0 and does not use the latest firmware. One the driver is set up, apt-get install wireless-tools, check "iwconfig", and if all is well set up /etc/network/interfaces accordingly.
==Bootsplash==
Here are some [http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/3124 instructions]. I've had no problems I could trace back to the radeon framebuffer device. vga=834 is for the 1400x1050 display. The bootsplash themes are accessible through the bootsplash.de debian archive, though I haven't yet found one for or adapted one to 1400x1050.
==ACPI==
===CPU frequency scaling===
First the relevant modules must be enabled in the kernel. Both the acpi-cpufreq and speedstep-centrino modules work to some extent, but I wasn't able to clock the CPU below 1.3 GHz with the speedstep-centrino module, while with acpi-cpufreq I had one non-reproduceable issue with the frequency being stuck at 800 MHz. You'll need to put the modules (acpi-cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand, cpufreq-conservative, cpufreq-powersave) in /etc/modules so that they are loaded at bootup. There are many ways to automatically manage frequency scaling behavior. I chose to use "cpufreqd" with this [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/cpufreqd.conf configuration], and there is also powernowd using the cpufreq-userspace governor, or writing your own ACPI event scripts.
===Suspend to RAM===
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel will crash on resume because there is no SATA support for suspend. There are patches at [How to make ACPI work|How to make ACPI work] which need minimal [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/sata_pm.2.6.12-mm2.diff changes] to work with 2.6.12-mm2 (note: I have no idea what I'm doing but it seems to work). The video card does not wake up after resume, but the X.org radeon driver will reset the card properly. If you want to get the text consoles back, you'll either have to append "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" to the GRUB kernel arguments for a VGA display, or use vbetool to save/restore video bios state for a framebuffer device (not exactly stable on my machine).
===Suspend to disk (hibernate)===
Software suspend comes with the kernel, and swsusp2 looks really nice but messy to patch into 2.6.12-mm2 (didn't really try). Without a swap drive I went for neither since suspend to RAM only takes ~.5 W of power and is much faster. It would be nice to be able to hibernate, switch to windows, and come back. swsusp2 is supposed to be merged with the kernel at some point, so perhaps it's enough to wait for that. Does anyone know how much power it takes to write and read 1 GB from disk, and how long one would need to hibernate vs. suspend to make up for the extra power?
==X==
===XFree86===
The radeon driver in the 4.3.0 XFree86 from Debian unstable is not new enough to support the Mobility X300. I tried the unofficial Debian [http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html fglrx] drivers, and with some suggestions from this [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335524 thread] was able to compile against 2.6.12-mm2, but ended up with a radeon driver which crashed my computer (maybe because I had DRI enabled in the kernel).
===X.org===
There are experimental X.org packages available [http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html here] which I am currently running with X300 support with the opensource drivers. I'm not really sure what I'm missing at this point.

[[Category:Debian]] [[Category:T43]]

Installing Debian Sid (June 2005) on a ThinkPad T43

2005-06-30T19:49:35Z

Aeyea: should have checked spelling

__TOC__

Please update with any contextual or cosmetic changes you feel appropriate.

June 30, 2005: Installing Debian/Sid (Unstable) on the T43 proved to be a very long process. Support for the relatively new machine should get much better over time, perhaps making much of this guide unnecessary. A great deal of useful information can be found in the T43 Category hardware page, and the other T-Series installation guides over on the Debian Category page.

==Installation==
===Partitioning the hard drive===
The thinkpad comes with Windows XP preinstalled but not set up. If you want to keep Windows it may be a good idea to turn on the machine and let it go through the Windows setup process before shrinking the partition. One step of the process is to convert the FAT32 windows parition to NTFS. The FAT32 partition may be easier to resize, but ntfsresize in Linux works fine too. For easy resizing, boot up in Knoppix 3.9+ with kernel 2.6 (earlier versions of Knoppix do not contain a 2.6 Kernel capable of handling the SATA drive). Once Knoppix is loaded head over to K->System->QtParted and you will be presented with a nice GUI for resizing the Windows partition. The Windows NTFS and IBM system restore FAT32 partitions take up 2/4 primary paritions, which doesn't leave much room for expansion. Between QtParted and cfdisk I partitioned my hard drive as:

- sda1 Primary NTFS 20 GB
- sda3 Primary Linux (reiser4) 20 GB (/)
- Extended remaining space (~30GB)
|- sda5 Logical Linux (ext3) 256 MB (/boot)
|- sda6 Logical Linux (ext3) 30 GB (/storage)
- sda2 Primary FAT32 (system restore)

If I started over I would probably put everything in a single extended parition. The reiser4 root parition here causes a lot of trouble because of the lack of widespread reiser4 support. The strategy here is to install the base system on sda6, compile a kernel with reiser4 support, and move everything back over to sda3. Obviously this can be skipped if you want to stick with ext3 or something else. The ext3 boot partition is also necessary since GRUB does not support reiser4 easily. sda6 will eventually become a FAT32 parition to share data between Windows and Linux. In the beginning you may find it useful to have an extra copy of everything on sda6 to use as a fall back in case something goes wrong. Also a swap partition can be very useful if you want to be able to hibernate the system easily, or if you have less than 1GB of memory. The inside of the drive (last sectors) can be ~50% slower than the outside (first sectors), so put frequently accessed portions up front.
===Running the net install===
As of June, 2005, the net installer still ships with a 2.6.8 kernel that will not read the SATA drive. It will be necessary to boot with kernel 2.4 to install the system (using legacy IDE drivers without DMA support - slow but manageable). To get all the latest and greatest, edit /apt/sources.list by hand and put in:

- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

the experimental repository may be necessary since the packages in unstable don't always have their dependencies satisfied within unstable. Don't worry since experimental packages must be manually installed. There is no need to install extra stuff at this point (X, etc) as it all can be taken care of after the system is working.
===Choosing a kernel===
Debian strips the Broadcom Tigon3 driver out of their 2.6.11 kernels. Also the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200/2915 drivers are unavailable. You can try to go the [http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html Debian-way] and download the Debian source and non-free patches while using the Debian modules tools to add support for everything. I decided to go over to [http://www.kernel.org www.kernel.org] and get the latest mm kernel (2.6.12-mm2 at the time). Kernel building instructions are [http://kerneltrap.org/node/875 here]. I started with the original Debian 2.6.11-1 configuration file (found in /boot), and made the major changes:

* P4 optimizations
* Preemptible Kernel
* built-in support for ext2, ext3, reiser4 (comes with mm kernel)
* built-in relevant SCSI and SATA support (ata_piix)
* Broadcom tg3 and IPW2200 modules

Also a number of little things can be removed and customized ([http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/linux-2.6.12-mm2.config .config] file). If you like go ahead and "apt-get ccache" then change "gcc" to "ccache gcc" and "g++" to "ccache g++" in the Makefile to speed up future compilations. The config file also represents bootsplash 3.1.6 and a SATA ACPI suspend fix patches to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel (see sections below). The nice thing about built-in filesystem and SATA support is that we don't need an initrd.

Before you boot into a 2.6 kernel, go into "/etc/fstab" and change "hda" to "sda", etc since the SATA drives are handled through the SCSI drivers.
==Reiser4==
The mm patch will add reiser4 support to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel. The next step is to change the root filesystem. Assuming the everything is installed in the ext3 partition on /dev/sda6, the steps are:
# apt-get install reiser4progs
# mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda3
# boot into a [http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Reiser4_Enabled_Live_CD reiser4-enabled live-CD]
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda6; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6}}
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda3; mount -t reiser4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3}}
#*# {{cmdroot|cp -a /mnt/sda6/* /mnt/sda3/}}
# if you don't want to get a reiser4 live-CD, you can use a regular CD and copy all of /dev/sda6 into a subdirectory, boot back into /dev/sda6 and copy it back to /dev/sda3
# update the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst
==Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG==
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel comes with the ipw2200 driver, but you'll still need to download the firmware from [http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php here] and put it in /lib/firmware. Note that the driver in 2.6.12-mm2 is version 1.0.0 and does not use the latest firmware. One the driver is set up, apt-get install wireless-tools, check "iwconfig", and if all is well set up /etc/network/interfaces accordingly.
==Bootsplash==
Here are some [http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/3124 instructions]. I've had no problems I could trace back to the radeon framebuffer device. vga=834 is for the 1400x1050 display. The bootsplash themes are accessible through the bootsplash.de debian archive, though I haven't yet found one for or adapted one to 1400x1050.
==ACPI==
===CPU frequency scaling===
First the relevant modules must be enabled in the kernel. Both the acpi-cpufreq and speedstep-centrino modules work to some extent, but I wasn't able to clock the CPU below 1.3 GHz with the speedstep-centrino module, while with acpi-cpufreq I had one non-reproduceable issue with the frequency being stuck at 800 MHz. You'll need to put the modules (acpi-cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand, cpufreq-conservative, cpufreq-powersave) in /etc/modules so that they are loaded at bootup. There are many ways to automatically manage frequency scaling behavior. I chose to use "cpufreqd" with this [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/cpufreqd.conf configuration], and there is also powernowd using the cpufreq-userspace governor, or writing your own ACPI event scripts.
===Suspend to RAM===
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel will crash on resume because there is no SATA support for suspend. There are patches at [How to make ACPI work|How to make ACPI work] which need minimal [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/sata_pm.2.6.12-mm2.diff changes] to work with 2.6.12-mm2 (note: I have no idea what I'm doing but it seems to work). The video card does not wake up after resume, but the X.org radeon driver will reset the card properly. If you want to get the text consoles back, you'll either have to append "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" to the GRUB kernel arguments for a VGA display, or use vbetool to save/restore video bios state for a framebuffer device (not exactly stable on my machine).
===Suspend to disk (hibernate)===
Software suspend comes with the kernel, and swsusp2 looks really nice but messy to patch into 2.6.12-mm2 (didn't really try). Without a swap drive I went for neither since suspend to RAM only takes ~.5 W of power and is much faster. It would be nice to be able to hibernate, switch to windows, and come back. swsusp2 is supposed to be merged with the kernel at some point, so perhaps it's enough to wait for that. Does anyone know how much power it takes to write and read 1 GB from disk, and how long one would need to hibernate vs. suspend to make up for the extra power?
==X==
===XFree86===
The radeon driver in the 4.3.0 XFree86 from Debian unstable is not new enough to support the Mobility X300. I tried the unofficial Debian [http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html fglrx] drivers, and with some suggestions from this [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335524 thread] was able to compile against 2.6.12-mm2, but ended up with a radeon driver which crashed my computer (maybe because I had DRI enabled in the kernel).
===X.org===
There are experimental X.org packages available [http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html here] which I am currently running with X300 support with the opensource drivers. I'm not really sure what I'm missing at this point.

Installing Debian Sid (June 2005) on a ThinkPad T43

2005-06-30T19:43:19Z

Aeyea:

__TOC__

Please update with any contextual or cosmetic changes you feel appropriate.

June 30, 2005: Installing Debian/Sid (Unstable) on the T43 proved to be a very long process. Support for the relatively new machine should get much better over time, perhaps making much of this guide unnecessary. A great deal of useful information can be found in the T43 Cateogry hardware page, and the other T-Series installation guides over on the Debian Category page.

==Installation==
===Partitioning the harddrive===
The thinkpad comes with Windows XP preinstalled but not set up. If you want to keep Windows it may be a good idea to turn on the machine and let it go through the Windows setup process before shrinking the parition. One step of the process is to convert the FAT32 windows parition to NTFS. The FAT32 partition may be easier to resize, but ntfsresize in Linux works fine too. For easy resizing, boot up in Knoppix 3.9+ with kernel 2.6 (earlier versions of Knoppix do not contain a 2.6 Kernel capable of handling the SATA drive). Once Knoppix is loaded head over to K->System->QtParted and you will be presented with a nice GUI for resizing the Windows partition. The Windows NTFS and IBM system restore FAT32 paritions take up 2/4 primary paritions, which doesn't leave much room for expansion. Between QtParted and cfdisk I paritioned my harddrive as:

- sda1 Primary NTFS 20 GB
- sda3 Primary Linux (reiser4) 20 GB (/)
- Extended remaining space (~30GB)
|- sda5 Logical Linux (ext3) 256 MB (/boot)
|- sda6 Logical Linux (ext3) 30 GB (/storage)
- sda2 Primary FAT32 (system restore)

If I started over I would probably put everything in a single extended parition. The reiser4 root parition here causes a lot of trouble because of the lack of widespread reiser4 support. The strategy here is to install the base system on sda6, compile a kernel with reiser4 support, and move everything back over to sda3. Obviously this can be skipped if you want to stick with ext3 or something else. The ext3 boot partition is also necessary since GRUB does not support reiser4 easily. sda6 will eventually become a FAT32 parition to share data between Windows and Linux. In the beginning you may find it useful to have an extra copy of everything on sda6 to use as a fallback in case something goes wrong. Also a swap partition can be very useful if you want to be able to hibernate the system easily, or if you have less than 1GB of memory. The inside of the drive (last sectors) can be ~50% slower than the outside (first sectors), so put frequently accessed portions up front.
===Running the net install===
As of June, 2005, the net installer still ships with a 2.6.8 kernel that will not read the SATA drive. It will be necessary to boot with kernel 2.4 to install the system (using legacy IDE drivers without DMA support - slow but manageable). To get all the latest and greatest, edit /apt/sources.list by hand and put in:

- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
- deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
- deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free

the experimental repository may be necessary since the packages in unstable don't always have their dependencies satisfied within unstable. Don't worry since experimental packages must be manually installed. There is no need to install extra stuff at this point (X, etc) as it all can be taken care of after the system is working.
===Choosing a kernel===
Debian strips the Broadcom Tigon3 driver out of their 2.6.11 kernels. Also the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200/2915 drivers are unavailable. You can try to go the [http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html Debian-way] and download the Debian source and non-free patches while using the Debian modules tools to add support for everything. I decided to go over to [http://www.kernel.org www.kernel.org] and get the latest mm kernel (2.6.12-mm2 at the time). Kernel building instructions are [http://kerneltrap.org/node/875 here]. I started with the original Deibian 2.6.11-1 configuration file (found in /boot), and made the major changes:

* P4 optimizations
* Preemptible Kernel
* built-in support for ext2, ext3, reiser4 (comes with mm kernel)
* built-in relevant SCSI and SATA support (ata_piix)
* Broadcom tg3 and IPW2200 modules

Also a number of little things can be removed and customized ([http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/linux-2.6.12-mm2.config .config] file). If you like go ahead and "apt-get ccache" then change "gcc" to "ccache gcc" and "g++" to "ccache g++" in the Makefile to speed up future compilations. The config file also represents bootsplash 3.1.6 and a SATA ACPI suspend fix patches to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel (see sections below). The nice thing about built-in filesystem and SATA support is that we don't need an initrd.

Before you boot into a 2.6 kernel, go into "/etc/fstab" and change "hda" to "sda", etc since the SATA drives are handled through the SCSI drivers.
==Reiser4==
The mm patch will add reiser4 support to the 2.6.12-mm2 kernel. The next step is to change the root filesystem. Assuming the everything is installed in the ext3 partition on /dev/sda6, the steps are:
# apt-get install reiser4progs
# mkfs.reiser4 /dev/sda3
# boot into a [http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Reiser4_Enabled_Live_CD reiser4-enabled live-CD]
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda6; mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6}}
#*# {{cmdroot|mkdir /mnt/sda3; mount -t reiser4 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3}}
#*# {{cmdroot|cp -a /mnt/sda6/* /mnt/sda3/}}
# if you don't want to get a reiser4 live-CD, you can use a regular CD and copy all of /dev/sda6 into a subdirectory, boot back into /dev/sda6 and copy it back to /dev/sda3
# update the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst
==Wireless: Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG==
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel comes with the ipw2200 driver, but you'll still need to download the firmware from [http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php here] and put it in /lib/firmware. Note that the driver in 2.6.12-mm2 is version 1.0.0 and does not use the latest firmware. One the driver is set up, apt-get install wireless-tools, check "iwconfig", and if all is well set up /etc/network/interfaces accordingly.
==Bootsplash==
Here are some [http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/3124 instructions]. I've had no problems I could trace back to the radeon framebuffer device. vga=834 is for the 1400x1050 display. The bootsplash themes are accessible through the bootsplash.de debian archive, though I haven't yet found one for or adapted one to 1400x1050.
==ACPI==
===CPU frequency scaling===
First the relevant modules must be enabled in the kernel. Both the acpi-cpufreq and speedstep-centrino modules work to some extent, but I wasn't able to clock the CPU below 1.3 GHz with the speedstep-centrino module, while with acpi-cpufreq I had one non-reproduceable issue with the frequency being stuck at 800 MHz. You'll need to put the modules (acpi-cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand, cpufreq-conservative, cpufreq-powersave) in /etc/modules so that they are loaded at bootup. There are many ways to automatically manage frequency scaling behavior. I chose to use "cpufreqd" with this [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/cpufreqd.conf configuration], and there is also powernowd using the cpufreq-userspace governor, or writing your own ACPI event scripts.
===Suspend to RAM===
The 2.6.12-mm2 kernel will crash on resume because there is no SATA support for suspend. There are patches at [How to make ACPI work|How to make ACPI work] which need minimal [http://www.mit.edu/~lindy/t43/sata_pm.2.6.12-mm2.diff changes] to work with 2.6.12-mm2 (note: I have no idea what I'm doing but it seems to work). The video card does not wake up after resume, but the X.org radeon driver will reset the card properly. If you want to get the text consoles back, you'll either have to append "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" to the GRUB kernel arguments for a VGA display, or use vbetool to save/restore video bios state for a framebuffer device (not exactly stable on my machine).
===Suspend to disk (hibernate)===
Software suspend comes with the kernel, and swsusp2 looks really nice but messy to patch into 2.6.12-mm2 (didn't really try). Without a swap drive I went for neither since suspend to RAM only takes ~.5 W of power and is much faster. It would be nice to be able to hibernate, switch to windows, and come back. swsusp2 is supposed to be merged with the kernel at some point, so perhaps it's enough to wait for that. Does anyone know how much power it takes to write and read 1 GB from disk, and how long one would need to hibernate vs. suspend to make up for the extra power?
==X==
===XFree86===
The radeon driver in the 4.3.0 XFree86 from Debian unstable is not new enough to support the Mobility X300. I tried the unofficial Debian [http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html fglrx] drivers, and with some suggestions from this [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=335524 thread] was able to compile against 2.6.12-mm2, but ended up with a radeon driver which crashed my computer (maybe because I had DRI enabled in the kernel).
===X.org===
There are experimental X.org packages available [http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/14794.html here] which I am currently running with X300 support with the opensource drivers. I'm not really sure what I'm missing at this point.