R32 new user

[mulambo187]

First post here, so Hi everyone, I got my R32 for free from the IT guy at work, windows was barely booting, taking about 15 minutes and then crashing. The IT guy tried running the recovery partition on it, but that ended up failing as well. As the computer was old and too slow for the people around here it was not worth his time at all to fix it. So I took it home with his advice that it would make a fancy door stop. I got an OEM xp pro disc I had and managed to format the whole hard drive, I don’t see what the big deal is for recovery discs, as far as I can tell I have every driver for it off IBMs website. Sooo….. it was working ok, but the hard drive was reporting bad clusters every couple of restarts. I replaced the hard drive for 160 gb one of ebay for about $100, and upgraded the ram to 512, from the local shop for about $40. Reinstalled windows xp again, with just an oem disc, and made my own recovery disk with DriveImageXML for future mishaps. I can now get the computer to a nice clean state with all the drivers in about 20 minutes. Just the other day I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it with Wubi, pretty cool program, I think its pretty close to what a dual boot is. My question is, does anyone know how to get the volume buttons at the top of the keyboard to work properly in ubuntu? I tried using tpb, but it looks ugly and stops working after a reboot. I know they worked “out of the box” with 7.10, so I would use that over 8.04, but then I get the issue of my pcmcia wireless card working in 8.04 and not 7.10 . Anyhow anyone here have linux/ubuntu experience on their thinkpads? I’d really like to hear what people have to say.

-Mike

[lparsons]

First of all, welcome to the club.
I dual boot my R32, though I use FreeBSD instead of Linux (personal preference). I can't say with 100% certainty that the volume buttons work completely. I can say, however, that the mute button works, and the volume up button will un-mute. I haven't noticed any difference in actual sound volume beyond that.

I can also say I've used a couple different versions of FreeBSD and the wireless has worked fine every time. I don't have ubuntu experience on my R32, so I can't tell you for sure if one release will do it better than the other.

I see that in FreeBSD we also call the thinkpad key utility 'tpb', so it probably begins with the same source. You may want to try downloading it from source to see what configuration options you have - you may be able to figure out a way to restore the look of it that you liked from 7.10.

[mulambo187]

lol i think checking the source or doing pretty much anything with it is probably way over my head, but i guess i'll never know till i try. never heard of freebsd, just checked the wikipedia article for it. does it have a desktop like ubuntu, pretty much the only way im gonna get things to working is if its possible to do it with a gui. tpb does what i want it to do still, do you know why it doesent work after reboots? likely though since i know that 7.10 does what i want with that, i will take of 8.04 (especially since i have seen a lot of negative comments about it) and replace it with 7.10. just gotta figure out how to use wubi with that, then get my wireless to work, i have an smc card and a linksys, and i have faith that one of them will work eventually with 7.10.

[lparsons]

I won't hold it against you that you haven't heard of FreeBSD, you have to be pretty crazy to run it on a laptop anyways. Though to answer your question regarding FreeBSD, you can run the same desktops in there as in Linux; KDE, GNOME, Blackbox, etc...

Building and installing software really isn't all that hard - you should already have the tools for it with your basic Linux install. And usually open source software is distributed with pretty good documentation to help you along as well.

As for your question on why tpb doesn't start when you start your system, I don't have an immediate answer. I would advise checking the files in the /rc*.d directories in your /etc directory (/etc/rc0.d, /etc/rc1.d ... /etc/rc9.d). There should be one in there that sets the behavior of tpb. Otherwise try googling around for information on how to set it up for "run level control". Or you could get extra-fancy and put it in your crontab, but that might irritate any other users who may use your system later...

EDIT: I didn't mean to trip the expletive filter on my own self-deprecating humor, my bad.