Installing Fedora 13 on a ThinkPad T510

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NOTE!
This is based on the KDE 32 bit live CD version of Fedora 13. Your experience with GNOME may be different. While I this page is still very raw, i do invite t510 fedora users to edit and fill it up

Success Chart - Out of the box experience

Item Working Notes
Installation Local CD/DVD install yes
Network Installation unknown
USB Installation yes
Display Laptop Screen (15.6" TFT display with 1920x1080(FHD) or 1600x900(HD+)) yes However nouveau driver has issues posted in bugzilla
VGA yes
Power Management Software Suspend (hibernate) yes
Suspend to Memory (ACPI sleep) yes
Audio yes
Wireless WiFi - ThinkPad 11b/g/n Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Express Adapter II yes After compiling driver. see notes below
Bluetooth yes It did detect my nokia e71 and i transferred some files from it.
Input Keyboard yes
(TrackPoint / Touchpad combo) yes
Extra keys partial see ThinkPad Extra keys section below
Fingerprint no Am still working on it. fprint seems not to recognize the device
Ports Ethernet yes
Modem unknown
Serial unknown
ExpressCard_slot unknown
PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse unknown Requires dock. I do not have a doc. Maybe someone with it can test and edit this page
Parallel unknown
USB yes
Firewire_Port unknown
PCMCIA/Cardbus yes
[Multicard reader 5-in-1 (MMC, MS, MS Pro, SD, SDHC)] yes 2GB SanDisk Ultra II SD flash card automatically detected.
2.0MP webcamera yes Tested with Skype. Works perfectly.
Harddisk Active Protection no There is now a hdapsd rpm, but it is not installed by default, and neither is the hdaps kernel module getting automatically loaded. And even after install it is not started automatically. Tried it manually (modprobe hdaps) but seems the module is not there in the kernel.
TPM (security subsystem) unknown
Dock removal unknown

Tested and Verified on Fedora 13

Information in this section has been tested and verified using Fedora 13.

Installation

Installation is straight forward; you can follow the generic Fedora install instructions. However as the default installation came with windows and drive was not partitioned, i had to manually resize the partitions. Using the fedora installation cd, when you reach the partition section, delete partition where windows was installed. Resize it. I gave windows a 50gb partition and the rest to fedora. Of course this means you no longer have any windows OS.

ATTENTION!
Be careful! Make sure you have make your recovery disks and Boot disk first prior to partitioning. These disks are made in windows itself. In my case i had 2 recovery DVD's and 1 boot cd. Also DO NOT delete the recovery partition or driver partition.

After the installation, grub might not show the OS selection menu which i did list as a bug. All you need to do is edit the /boot/grub.conf file and change timeout=0 to timeout=10 When you reboot and select windows of course it wont be there. You will get an error. All you need to do now is install the boot disk (NOT RECOVERY), restore your windows by selecting the recovery partition. This will reinstall windows 7 back to the original factory settings to your 50GB drive. When you reboot grub will still be there.

Updating

After updating the system, i rebooted to the new kernel. The display went blank most probably due to the experimental noveau driver. I solved it by rebooting the comp to the old kernel and installing the proprietary nvidea card drivers using this guide. Then reboot your system and all should run well. I highly recommend you use the nvidia driver as the one in fedora gives a real headache. Dont forget you need to update your system first.

Configuration

Kernel

..

Issues

  • Problems booting to the latest kernel if you use noveau driver. See note above on how to solve this.

WiFi

The kernel has no support for the wifi card. lspci shows my card as 03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8192SE Wireless LAN Controller (rev 10) Installing it is very simple.

1. Download the driver from the realtek site

  In my case the driver is RTL8192SE so i selected the linux driver and downloaded it. 

2. Install the following packages to compile it

# yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel

# yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

3. Extract the tar file you downloaded.

4. Run this command $ make

5. If no errors run command # make install as root and reboot

ThinkPad Extra keys

ThinkPad keys are handled by a mixture of the thinkpad_acpi, acpi button and acpi dock drivers.

Key Function Handled by Event Works Notes
FnF2 Lock the computer - unknown yes
FnF3 Select Power Plan - unknown unknown
FnF4 Put Computer to sleep/standby mode - unknown yes
FnF5 wireless - unknown unknown
FnF6 Change camera/audio settings - unknown unknown
FnF7 Switch Display output location - unknown unknown
FnF8 Change ultranav device settings - unknown partial Allows to turn on/off trackpad
FnF12 Put computer in hibernation mode - unknown unknown
FnHome brightness up - unknown yes
FnEnd brightness down - unknown yes
FnPgUp thinklight - unknown yes
FnSpace zoom - unknown unknown
FnPrtSc Have the same function as the SysRq key. - unknown unknown
FnScrLk Enable or disable the numeric keypad. - unknown yes
FnPause Have the same function as the Break key. - unknown unknown
ThinkVantage Vendor key - unknown unknown
VolumeUp Volume Up - unknown yes
VolumeDown Volume Down - unknown yes
VolumeMute Volume Mute - unknown yes
MicMute Microphone Mute - unknown no
NextTab Browser Next tab - unknown yes
PreviousTab Browser Previous tab - unknown yes
Power Power button - unknown yes
Lid Lid button - unknown yes