Thinkpads Forum

I've just spent most of my day off yesterday installing Suse 10.0 on a Thinkpad R40. I must say, I'm very favorably impressed. It mostly works. And it works well enough against my wife's requirements that we're going to keep on using it. But there are some niggling little problems I'd like to work through, and I'm hoping I can get some help.

In the Gnome menu, under Applications->System->Configuration there is a utility called "Configure Thinkpad". When I attempt to run that utility, I get the following error message:

"Neither /dev/thinkpad/thinkpad nor /dev/thinkpad exists. Please create the device."

What now? I'm not sure what to make of that message. Why would Suse install a utility and yet fail to provide the necessary device file? Is there a solution?

By using google I found the following links might help:

(TP power management by using SMAPI)
http://tpctl.sourceforge.net/
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/SMAPI_sup ... api_module

(TP power management by using ACPI)
http://ibm-acpi.sourceforge.net/

I don't really know how many different methods there are to get the "suspend" "sleep" "standby" working on Thinkpad but it definitely needs some tunning before you can see the result.

You might also want to find out how to create device node under /dev and how to re-compile your linux kernel in order to add more features for your thinkpad which the vanila kernel doesn't include.

You could also ask SUSE or GNOME for help but if you didn't pay them to take care of the tech. problems for you, you most likely need to fix the problems yourself by using more WWW search.

You're not the first person who noticed that tpctl doesn't work under Suse 10.0. It's possible that it works on a T2x, but nothing seems to make it work at all on a T4x or R4x model. You might try the Suse forums for better answers. If you find an answer, please let us know.

Incidentally, here's a plug for Ubuntu, which works extremely well with the T4x series and probably with the R4x series. See other discussions in this forum.