Installing Linux On An IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad R52

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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