Difference between revisions of "Installing Linux On An IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad R52"

Revision as of 14:54, 8 March 2006

These are some notes from what I've discovered installing Linux, and in particular Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy", onto an IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad R52.

Pre-Installation Steps

These are a few things that I decided to do prior to installing Linux onto the notebook.

Created Rescue & Recovery Discs

In Windows there is a program to create the recovery discs:

Start -> All Programs -> Access IBM -> Create Recovery Discs

It prompts you to put blank/erasable discs in the drive; I used two DVDs though I now believe that the first disc may only need to be a CD rather than a DVD.

After you've created one set of discs it wont let you create any more sets.

Created Rescue Media

There is another program for creating "Recovery Media" accessible from the start menu:

Start -> All Programs -> Access IBM -> Create Rescue Media

I believe this just creates the same thing as the first CD in the above step though so shouldn't be required.

Updated Firmware

I checked Lenovo's website to see if any of the firmware needed updating. I updated the BIOS (from version 1.18 to 1.22), everything else seemed to be up to date for me.

I noticed that most of the firmware updates are available as bootable CD images and things so it shouldn't be a problem to update firmware in future even with no Windows on the machine.

Installed Additional Memory Module

I'd purchased an additional 512MB memory module from Crucial, so I put that in and checked that it was visible by the BIOS and Windows before installing Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Installation

I actually wanted a Kubuntu installation (using KDE rather than the default GNOME of Ubuntu), but I had an Ubuntu CD lying around so I decided to do that and add the Kubuntu bits afterwards. So I used a regular Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy" installation CD and didn't use any special parameters at the boot prompt (I did try using "expert" mode first, but that just left me with all sorts of problems once it was installed, so I went back and installed it using the default installation mode).

Disk Partitioning

I used the manual patitioning mode when it got to that part of the installer. There were two partitions, one taking most of the disk for the main Windows installation and then a second partition of around 3GB for the IBM "Pre-Desktop Area" used for Windows recovery and so on. I deleted the main Windows partition and decided to leave the pre-desktop partition for now. I created one large partition of around 50GB to be the root filesystem (e3fs) and allocated the rest, approx 5GB, as a swap partition.

WiFi During Install

My home WiFi network uses WEP encryption in a "shared-key" system. I entered my WEP key etc in the installer but it failed to connect to my network. I found that I had to change my wireless access point from "shared-key" to "open" in order to get it to connect up. Once I had done that I was able to complete the install using WiFi just fine.

Fetching Updates

Once the Ubuntu installation was complete I made sure all the packages were up to date using APT from a terminal window:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade

Adding More Repositories

I modified /etc/apt/sources.list to uncomment the 'universe' repository there by giving me access to more software via APT. I uncommented the following lines:

deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe

and following that I ran the following to update my package list with the newly available software:

sudo apt-get update

Kubuntu & KDE

Now that I'd got a base Ubuntu system, I decided to install the KDE parts to get a Kubuntu system. This is done easily by fetching the kubuntu-desktop package:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

I think that during the installation of that package it prompted me to select whether to use the gdm (GNOME based) or kdm (KDE based) login screen. I opted for kdm.

Upgrading KDE To 3.5.1

Breezy by default uses KDE 3.4.3, but I found that I needed to upgrade this in order to get DVD playback working (details to follow). So, I upgraded to KDE 3.5.1 using info from an Ubuntu forum article. The condensed steps I performed were:

Fetched and added package maintainer's key:

wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~jriddell/kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg
sudo apt-key add kubuntu-packages-jriddell-key.gpg

Added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list to add the repository:

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde351 breezy main

Upgraded everything:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Power Management

Suspend To RAM

This seems to mostly work right from the default Ubuntu installation. I can hit Fn+F4 on the keyboard and the machine will suspend to RAM. I can then wake it up by pressing the power button, or alternatively if the lid is closed then opening it resumes.

I say that it mostly works for I've seen a couple of issues:

• On one occasion it did not resume correctly, instead I was left with a blank screen.
• On one other occasion the machine resumed correctly but then immediately shut down (using the normal shutdown procedure).
• Sometimes the Fn+F4 button combination doesn't work and I have to use a software method instead (eg. from the KLaptop applet on the Kicker).

There are also some other things I'd like to get working right with it:

• When suspending to RAM using Fn+F4 the machine suspends, but when it resumes you are not prompted for any password it just lets you right in. If you suspend from software, eg. the KLaptop applet, then it does prompt you for password.
• I would like the ThinkPad to suspend to RAM if I close the lid, but I haven't found a way to do that yet.

Suspend To Disk / Hibernate

With the default Ubuntu installation this didn't work. The suspend to disk seemed to work, but when I tried to resume it would leave me with a blank screen.

The solution (workaround) to this has been to make some changes to the grub bootloader. I removed the kernel parameter "splash" from all the kernel lines in /boot/grub/menus.lst so changing them from lines like this:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash

to lines like this:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet

After editing that file I needed to reinstall the grub bootloader using the following command:

sudo grub-install /dev/sda

Once I'd done that resume from hibernate has worked fine for me. Like with suspend to RAM sometimes the Fn+F12 key combination doesn't work and you have to use the software method instead and also like with suspend to RAM using the Fn+F12 combination means that you don't get prompted for a password on resume.