who has LINUX or OS/2 loaded on their T42..?

Message

zigver · #31 Post by **zigver** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 2:40 pm

quarx wrote:has anyone experiences with gentoo on a T42? any info would be great ...

I have gentoo on my T42p. It's a Stage 1 install and running just fine except I haven't configured any of the power management. No dual boot, exorcised the harddisk from anything windows. I would suggest you scrounge the gentoo forums and docs section, they are both quite good. There's really nothing magical about installing it on a Thinkpad and you should easily get a bootable system by following the install guide.

Volker · #32 Post by **Volker** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 4:45 pm

The way to make a preloadable image is first stick with some big distribution, say redhat/fedora. Redhat has a way to do automated installs, using kickstart. You only have to specify which files to install, and maybe package one or two thinkpad-specific programs. Still, needs a few days to make it really work smoothly.

lfeagan · #33 Post by **lfeagan** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:01 pm

Yes, Kickstart can in fact be quite nice. I have messed with it some and my best friend runs the Math Dept computer's at the University and pushes stuff out through Kickstart to download images to the machines whenever new ones come in and the like. I am sure he could give some good pointers on doing that.

On a more personal note: Bill, I think that a lot of us would be thrilled to help you get linux on the Thinkpads. There seem to be a fair number of us around here who are into alternative OSes of some form and some of us have been UNIX systems admins for years and should be pretty capable of getting something like this built up. Perhaps sometime soon we should begin to forumulate a more specific enumeration of what we want and plan for the implementation order/timing/testing. If we don't really set down and figure out what we want we will have the bazaar out of the bazaar instead of building a cathedral out of parts from a bazaar.

There are generally three stages to any good design process:
1) Preliminary--This is where you dont' deal with specifics too much. We should think of the general things such as I want a media player. Specifics such as what formats you want to play are not what you want here. we are looking at the bits of functionality we desire.
2) Initial Design--This is where we get more specific and state that we want things like the ability to play WMV or MP3 or open Word 2000 Documents. We then use the requirements and constraints that we have to narrow down our selection of software to what we want to include.
3) Final Design--This is where we finalize what components we are going to use and then develop a coherent plan for implementing them in an organized fashion. Tasks should be assigned priorities, etc.

I am willing to do a lot of the help in the planning and documentation/sorting through requests to organize this into something that is a coherent and managable product for you (and for the customers) to distribute.

#34 Post by **JaneL** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:03 pm

You forgot Stage 4 - after-sale support...

zigver · #35 Post by **zigver** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 7:14 pm

nonny wrote:You forgot Stage 4 - after-sale support...

What kind of after-sale support are you talking about? If you mean a # for someone to call up when they need assistance upgrading a package, getting NTP setup, setting up samba, and the plethora other blah blah blah stuff, that's a big bite to chew and should be VERY carefully thought out before offering that kind of service.

#36 Post by **JaneL** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 7:15 pm

Precisely my point.

#37 Post by **carbon_unit** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 7:41 pm

That is why I suggested a commercial distro which would provide this type of service.
The free stuff you have to support yourself with a user forum. Not always so good for the newbie.

zigver · #38 Post by **zigver** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 8:00 pm

carbon_unit wrote:That is why I suggested a commercial distro which would provide this type of service.
The free stuff you have to support yourself with a user forum. Not always so good for the newbie.

I find user forums/googling are often much better than calling up support. I really don't like RH so I don't follow it close but isn't Fedora now unsupported? I thought you have to go with RHEL if you want support from RedHat.

lfeagan · #39 Post by **lfeagan** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 9:02 pm

I didn't forget anything, I was talking about the stages in the design process. That was not a whole product development cycle and if you read more carefully that would have been entirely obvious.

#40 Post by **carbon_unit** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 9:57 pm

zigver wrote:
carbon_unit wrote:That is why I suggested a commercial distro which would provide this type of service.
The free stuff you have to support yourself with a user forum. Not always so good for the newbie.
I find user forums/googling are often much better than calling up support. I really don't like RH so I don't follow it close but isn't Fedora now unsupported? I thought you have to go with RHEL if you want support from RedHat.

I like finding my own answers too but I am not a newbie, are you?
I think Bill wants something slanted towards the new Linux converts.

lfeagan · #41 Post by **lfeagan** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 10:00 pm

Thank god carbon unit reminded us of the part before design: What on earth is our objective? We can then create an objectives tree to help us determine our requirements our design needs to meet. So Bill, what do you want to see?

zigver · #42 Post by **zigver** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 11:55 am

carbon_unit wrote:
zigver wrote: I find user forums/googling are often much better than calling up support. I really don't like RH so I don't follow it close but isn't Fedora now unsupported? I thought you have to go with RHEL if you want support from RedHat.
I like finding my own answers too but I am not a newbie, are you?
I think Bill wants something slanted towards the new Linux converts.

No, I'm a Solaris/Linux sysadmin. Agreed on new Linux converts but my point was that most tech support provided for software, unless you pay a LOT, is going to cause more frustration than just going on the web and searching yourself. I just hope Bill realizes what he might be getting into by offering this level of service because it's far from trivial, provided the service is good.

brewt · #43 Post by **brewt** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 12:45 pm

carbon_unit wrote:I think Bill wants something slanted towards the new Linux converts.

Yup, that and people who don't have the time to install Linux on their system. Since you just can't satisfy everyone, those people without the time will have to use a newbie linux distribution.

Another question is how is Bill going to sell this? Are you going to charge a lot extra for the preload? Or is going to be a free option (an option that would possibly swing more people to buy from Bill instead of someone else)?

I think the chosen distribution should have/be:
- paid support available (we really can't provide TOTAL support for this, instead we would provide support for the ThinkPad specific software/configuration)
- good free support forum available (eg. like Gentoo's forum)
- large and popular - which means many different packages available for the system and more likely to have paid support available
- easy to use (ie. has GUI tools for everything [yuck, but that's what you need for a newbie linux])

That's all I can think of right now, and I really should be getting to work, so more later I guess. I personally don't really care what distribution is chosen since it'll probably be one I haven't used before. I'm more concerned about the ThinkPad customizations and hardware installation (which I'll soon be getting to do with my own 2378FVU).

#44 Post by **carbon_unit** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 1:45 pm

I agree with both of the above posts, but before we proceed we need to know what Bill wants this to be. A total windows clone is not possible so we need a list of requirements and their priorities.
The support part is going to be the toughest part. What level is needed, email, forum or telephone support?

ZPrime · #45 Post by **ZPrime** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 3:54 pm

while it's somewhat premature, i'll throw in my $0.02 and mention Ubuntu again as the "right" distro to go with. It works perfectly out of the box on almost every machine i've tried it on. I have it "installed" in a VMWare session on my T42 and it works well - i can fullscreen it and feel like i'm actually using a linux system instead of windows!

I'd be interested in seeing what you guys come up with; a "Thinkpad-Linux" would be nice and would tempt me even more into dumping windows from this thing... The only things that have kept me back so far are the lack of a good alternative to Visio and other network inventory-type tools, plus games.

aleung · #46 Post by **aleung** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 2:31 am

When I use my T30 (P4 1.8 768M Ram). running VMware is very slow even performance in battery.. but pretty good with AC. so I give up. How is Linux + vmware running on Pentium M ?

btw: how many people really an *nix guru ? They may keep calling IBM for support

nello · #47 Post by **nello** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 3:31 am

I am running Linux on my T41 7KH!:)

would · #48 Post by **would** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 6:52 am

i'm running suse 9.2 on my T41p -- and it works perfect!!!!
Wireless - everything. There are also special Thinkpad-Tools for "Standby" "Suspend to RAM/Disk" and a lot more!

It's fantastic - and all this out of the box

Try it

there's a live-DVD available on the suse ftp-server!!

#49 Post by **BillMorrow** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 1:20 pm

carbon_unit wrote:I agree with both of the above posts, but before we proceed we need to know what Bill wants this to be. A total windows clone is not possible so we need a list of requirements and their priorities.
The support part is going to be the toughest part. What level is needed, email, forum or telephone support?

what i WANT is something like what would describes..

where everything works..
including the new fingerprint reader..
(which, BTW, i think is seen as a USB device by the OS)

along with a basic office suite..

most or all of which can be delivered along with a new thinkpad..

#50 Post by **carbon_unit** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 1:37 pm

I'll check that out.

brewt · #51 Post by **brewt** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 6:19 pm

morrow wrote:including the new fingerprint reader..
(which, BTW, i think is seen as a USB device by the OS)

Unfortunately, weird hardware like the fingerprint reader would probably be one of the things that would not work in Linux. New strange hardware + closed spec hardware + linux = no workie

#52 Post by **BillMorrow** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 1:10 am

brewt wrote:
morrow wrote:including the new fingerprint reader..
(which, BTW, i think is seen as a USB device by the OS)
Unfortunately, weird hardware like the fingerprint reader would probably be one of the things that would not work in Linux. New strange hardware + closed spec hardware + linux = no workie

that would be a problem..
security chip AND fingerprint reader would need to work..
i wonder if ibm has linux drivers for these devices..?!

brewt · #53 Post by **brewt** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 1:17 am

morrow wrote:security chip AND fingerprint reader would need to work..
i wonder if ibm has linux drivers for these devices..?!

The security chip has an even slimmer chance of working, since it's an IBM only piece of hardware

Probably the only chance it'd ever work would be if IBM made drivers for it (I doubt it'd be easy to reverse engineer, or IBM would release specs for it).

Who here actually uses their security chip?

#54 Post by **carbon_unit** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 7:32 am

Is it possible that the fingerprint reader is executed in the firmware and therefore OS independant?

nesen · #55 Post by **nesen** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 8:11 am

The linux driver for the security chip, believe it or not, is in the works: http://www.research.ibm.com/gsal/tcpa/

lfeagan · #56 Post by **lfeagan** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:29 am

I would like to add one more constraint to the mix, its a personal one, but one that I feel is very important. I personally have a strong need to have full 3D OpenGL acceleration. As a result, I still run Suse 9.1 and will likely have to continue running it for a long time as ATi is terribly slowing about releasing ATi drivers. I tried for a few hours to get the X.org version with FC3 to work to no avail. There are some kernel hacks that get it to "work" but they make the system extremely unstable. So, I think that we should add to our list working OpenGL implementation.

I will say though, Fedora Core 3 is very nice looking from a desktop users perspective. They have done a good job uncluttering the menu heirarchy from what it was in FC2. My personal vote for what distro should be the basis is Suse 9.1 (and 9.2 once ATi supports it). Despite the large number of people who use Fedora, many companies refuse to support it because they don't consider it to be a commercial distro (which I do understand, but...). So, as much as i might like Fedora, I can't say that it would be particularly wise to go with it from a support standpoint. But, the good news though is that RHEL4 is about to come out, which is virtually identical to FC3. So, that should hasten the support that ATi gives to FC3 vis-a-vis RHEL4 being the same thing. I even saw lots of mentions of RHEL4 in the FC3 naming conventions and admin tools.

On the other hand, Novell/Suse Linux, does look like it will likely have a long future of good support ahead of it. Novell really looks to have a good understanding of the market they can fit into and Suse should help them keep their enterprise customers using Netware long into the future. Suse can make a somewhat annoying desktop OS but really is quite capable and nice to use for a server OS. I do like the fact that by default Suse mounts your NTFS drive(s) for you under /windows/C (/windows/D, etc...). I think that this is something that eases the transition and makes users less frustrated when they forget to copy something to a common place of RW access for both Windows and Linux. You can just grab it RO from /windows/C and they copy it to your reiserfs partition (what Suse uses by default).

So, I grabbed the security chip driver for the 2.6.x series kernel from IBM and am gonna try it out. /got my fingers crossed

Volker · #57 Post by **Volker** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:33 am

The tcpa chip is supported by IBM's driver, but overall of very little use. I do not know of anyone who integrated it into the system security. In principle, I think one could encrypt the harddisk using a key stored on the chip (as opposed to on the harddisk). In any case, the key would have to be protected by a passphrase. Both stop casual data thieves and neither protects you against extortion.

Reading reviews, my impression was that the fingerprint scanner works on a BIOS level. So you would not need any special software, it only replaces the power on password. The only Windows integration is that the user with the fingerprint (who has or had the corresponding finger :-) is then automatically logged on. Only the latter would not work without driver support. Can anyone comment on this who actually tried it?

#58 Post by **BillMorrow** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:38 am

in the simplest form, the fingerprint reader acts in place of the log in password..
not power on password..

there are more levels but i have not tried them, yet..

one is HDD fingerprint locking..

lfeagan · #59 Post by **lfeagan** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 3:51 pm

So, just thinking about it from the perspective of what might need to be done/integrated, I thought this was a list of things that we should get done, in some order of priority. I can write a piece of software like the IBM Access Connections pretty easily. I will try to work up some sketches of how it should be architected over Thanksgiving.

IBM Notebook Special Features Needed

Thinkpad Buttons (requires xosd to do on-screen display)
Buttons Needed are:
1. Access IBM (Maps to "Thinkpad button, but it works. What should we link it to run though?)
2. Volume Up (Works)
3. Volume Down (Works)
4. Mute (Works)
5. Blank Screen, Fn-F3 (ibm-acpi)
6. Suspend/Sleep, Fn-F4 (ibm-acpi)
7. Wireless Button, Fn-F5. (Seems to do bluetooth on/off) (ibm-acpi)
8. Switch internal/external display, Fn-F7.
9. Hibernate, Fn-F12.(ibm-acpi)
10. Contrast Up, Fn-Home. (Works)
11. Contrast Down, Fn-End. (Works)
12. ThinkLight, Fn-PgUp. (Works)
13. Zoom, Fn-Spacebar.
ATi Radeon/FireGL Drivers for Linux (Suse 9.1 has these prepackaged for it, so I would call this another works)
Something like the IBM Access Connections to make finding and connecting to both wired and wireless network much more user friendly than it currently is. (Anyone know of anything better than the awful interfaces all linux distros have? Otherwise we will have to churn this out on our own.)
Security Chip enablement (Haven't tried this out yet, but there is software avaialble)
Thinkpad Presentation Director type software

nesen · #60 Post by **nesen** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 4:45 pm

I want to note that

e.
f.
i. (not tested, but reported to work esp. with swsusp2)
and m.
work without any problems. (e, f and i don't work with tpb, of course, since theres nothing to display anyway)

Well, there's one problem, at least for me: Fn-F4 generates acpi events, but only sometimes, therefore I now go to sleep by Fn-F8

Because I never need the zoom function, I did not write the "code" (actually 5 lines of bash) to switch resolutions, but it's no problem at all. (Doesn't SuSE include all this stuff?)

3. http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/le ... s/ifplugd/
and http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/waproamd/ look like they may be helpful, as you said, it should be no problem to write that from scratch, especially with those 2 tools.

and I also want to add another point (for me a very important one)

6. Thinkpad Trackpoint patches applied and a easy to use interface for the stuff in /proc/trackpoint (like in windows: setting the sensitivity, speed, force required to trigger a click and so on)

I somehow like the idea of a pre installed linux distro where everything works, but I wouldn't be the one who supports that. Therefore I would map "Access IBM" to "favouritebrowser http://www.google.com"

who has LINUX or OS/2 loaded on their T42..?

Linux preload

Who is online