Installation instructions for the ThinkPad X24

Specific installation notes for the ThinkPad X24.

General Notes

If you don't have a CD-ROM solution, please look at Installation on ThinkPads without CD-ROM drive.

Distro specific Instructions

Ubuntu 7.04 - Feisty Fawn

Video Adapter

By default Ubuntu sets the ati driver in xorg.conf. It is a wrapper which points (on the X24) to the radeon driver. You could simply displace ati by radeon. If you want use desktop effects you have to lower the depth to 16. On depth 24 the video adapter does not provide direct rendering, which is necessary for an acceptable animation performance.

Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Adapter

There are 3 drivers shipped with the standard kernel of Ubuntu: orinoco_pci (WEP), prism2_pci (WEP) and hostap_pci (WEP/WPA/WPA2). All 3 are active by default. Usually the orinoco driver should be used in a standard installation. With a blacklist you could activate/deactivate a special driver. You can provide a blacklist by creating a file in /etc/modprobe.d.

orinoco

If you want use the orinoco driver you have to create a file in /etc/modprobe.d where you blacklist the other 2 drivers:

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-wlan

  blacklist hostap
  blacklist hostap_pci
  blacklist prism2_pci

hostap

If you want use WPA or WPA2 encryption with your wireless lan adapter you have to use the hostap driver. The blacklist in /etc/modprobe.d should look like this:

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-wlan

  blacklist hermes
  blacklist orinoco
  blacklist orinoco_pci
  blacklist prism2_pci

If you have trouble to connect to an access point you should check the firmware version of your wireless adapter:

  > dmesg | grep wifi
  ...
  wifi0: NIC: id=0x8013 v1.0.0
  wifi0: PRI: id=0x15 v1.1.0
  wifi0: STA: id=0x1f v1.4.9

With some older versions the hostap driver does not work. I use the combination of 1.1.1 and 1.7.4 which seems to be the most reasonable firmware versions:

  wifi0: NIC: id=0x8013 v1.0.0
  wifi0: PRI: id=0x15 v1.1.1
  wifi0: STA: id=0x1f v1.7.4

How to upgrade your firmware is explained on http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/. Some firmware versions are hosted on http://www.netgate.com/support/prism_firmware.

You will find a detail description of the 3 linux wlan drivers on: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.802.11b.html

Standby or Suspend-to-Ram

If you have trouble with you standby mode and you use the Network Manager, you should deactivate the Network Manager before entering the standby mode by adding the following file to /etc/acpi/suspend.d:

/etc/acpi/suspend.d/05-network-manager.sh

  #!/bin/sh   
  dbus-send --system \
    --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager \
    /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager \
    org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.sleep

and resume:

/etc/acpi/resume.d/91-network-manager.sh

  #!/bin/sh
  dbus-send --system \
    --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager \
    /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager \
    org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.wake

This seems to solve the problem. (Found on: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/feisty/+source/network-manager/+bug/40125)

External Sources

• OpenBSD on a ThinkPad X24
• Debian on a ThinkPad X24