Lenovo Thinkpad T60p (left) and Thinkpad T42p (right) running Gentoo Linux

I recently upgraded my Thinkpad T42p for a T60p. The T42p was running Gentoo Linux and I was very happy with that, so I planned on installing Gentoo on the T60p as well. Since the T60p was fairly new and there weren't many guides, I decided to do some research and write down some of the issues I had.

Here are some quick specs for the T60p:

• 2Ghz Intel Core Duo processor T2500 (Centrino)
• 2Gbytes DDR2 SDRAM
• 100Gbytes SATA 7200rpm Harddrive (hdparm was claiming about 50Mbytes/sec)
• 15inch 1600x1200 LCD display
• ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 (dual head capable)
• Ultrabay Slim with DVD recordable x24
• Integrated Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
• Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG 802.11a/b/g
• Intel High Definition Audio

The PCI/PCI Express bus:

Install Gentoo from CD

The doscsi flag was more just me being paranoid, knowing that the T60p uses Serial ATA and libata adds those as scsi devices. You can probably do without it, I never bothered as I only went through this process once. When the liveCD booted and X started up, I clicked on the graphical install wizard, and went with mostly all the default (or recommended) options. I always resync, recompile, and reconfigure after this step anyways. I chose an all GRP install (networkless) since that allows me to get past this step the quickest and used the liveCD kernel (no sources). One thing that I noticed right away about the wired ethernet (e1000 driver) is that if I don't setup the eth0 device in the install wizard, the device never gets bound. I've also read in other places some minor issues with the Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller like it getting dropped or the device not getting bound after the e1000 module gets loaded. Other than configuring eth0 and saving, I went straight through the install then a reboot sans LiveCD.

Booting off the harddrive

Since the liveCD kernel doesn't come with sources, I need to emerge them. I wanted the most recent sources so I did a sync first:

Then I choose gentoo-sources (with the ibm stuff), and also chose this time to update genkernel and portage:

The next thing, configure my kernel. The liveCD kernel is genkernel'ed, so I'll just stick with that (although with udev in and coldplug out, there's no reason to use genkernel anymore):

Here is my kernel .config file, I mainly just turned the majority of the random drivers on or made them into modules. I also turned on all the Bluetooth subsystem and the drivers (bluetooth), kismet, SYN Cookies and netfilter/iptables since I use that stuff. Another thing you may want to consider turning off is the Direct Rendering Manager, as I read the ati drivers won't jive with it. I also used the kernel ALSA drivers for sound. Turn on ALSA support, and turn on Intel High Definition Audio if you want to use the kernel drivers, otherwise just turn on ALSA support (and you'll need to emerge alsa later). After the kernel and modules are finished compiling, update your boot loader (I used grub, and here is my grub.conf). Remember that your drive will be /dev/sda because of SATA.

Installing drivers and software

After that, I wanted to get off the wire and get on my wireless, so I did the following:

I choose to use wireless-tools instead of wpa_supplicant, since I already have the /etc/conf.d/wireless file from my old laptop. Here's a link to gentoo's wireless How-To, it walks you through both iwconfig and wpa_supplicant. I then created a net.eth1 and added it using rc-update:

Then I reboot just for safe measure, remembering to remove the ethernet cable from the laptop. Coldplug automatically found my wireless so I didn't need to add that to the modules.autoload.d list. The ipw3945 driver is still a little flakey. Currently, I have issues from time to time when I bring down eth1 (802.11 wireless) and bring it back up (usually on a different network). The 802.11 a/b/g LED flickers really fast and it hangs on * Configuring wireless network for eth1 for a little while before failing. /var/log/messages reports: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth1: link is not ready, which doesn't seem that unusual (it reports that even if bringing up eth1 doesn't fail). I have a dodgy work around for this when I don't feel like restarting the machine: shutdown ipw3945d, get rid of the ipw3945 and the ieee80211 modules, and reinsert them. (Note: These directions don't quite work for the newest versions of the gentoo portage tree and the ipw3945 driver, see the UPDATE at the bottom)

We need to first shutdown ipw3945d properly using the --kill flag. Then we need to force remove the ipw3945 module, this is probably unadvisable, but it's being used by kernel processes (nice=-5) and this is the only way to get rid of both the processes and the module. You can then remove the other 802.11 modules and reinsert ipw3945. This will bring up ipw3945d as well as the other 802.11 modules and I'm able to start net.eth1 without any problems.

I wanted my laptop to have all the things my old laptop had, so I just took the world and emerged everything all in one go. Here is my world file as well as an equery list. I took the /var/lib/portage/world file from my old laptop, removed the Thinkpad T42p specific drivers (like ipw2200) from the list, and renamed it old_world. My emerge command looked like this:

This removes all the random non-package lines (-v '^ ') and removes the version info at the end of each package (s/'\-[0-9].*'/""/g). The second emerge command makes sure the stuff that wasn't part of my old_world gets updated as well. I didn't run into any problems except for a few packages that got pruned out of the dep tree (just emerge --unmerge them) and the change in the name that slocate uses. You can add a -vp to check for the former.

Now that I have nearly everything installed and my new T60p is a spitting image of my old T42p, I'll bring up a few random things:

• I prefer SSH.org's implementation over openssh's. That's as simple as unmerging openssh and emerging net-misc/ssh.
• I emerged all the bluez and gnome-bluetooth stuff, although I'm not sure if the bluez stuff is needed
• If you didn't compile ALSA drivers into the kernel, emerge alsa-driver and stuff, then rc-update add alsasound default
• You may also want to emerge thinkpad and tpctl (and most likely acpitool so that hotplugging works for thinkpad specific stuff)
• I emerged ati-drivers, but the version that I got (8.21.7-r1) isn't one that works with this graphics card

Fingerprint Reader

Before you emerge these 3 ebuilds, the bioapi package NEEDS the qt USE flag. There are 2 versions of the program that creates the fingerprint file, a graphical version (QSample) and a command line version (Sample, but (as of 6/11/2006) the command line version doesn't allow you to enroll a fingerprint. In order to get the graphical version, you need qt. So this is what I did:

You can pretty much follow the directions on the website from here on. Everything works as advertised. You may need to play around with /etc/pam.d/xscreensaver a bit in order to get that working to your satisfaction. I created a /etc/pam.d/bioapi:

and added an include in the xscreensaver pam.d file. Consult the pam.d man page for more options.

Other stuff

I mentioned earlier that the ati-driver that's part of the most recent portage tree doesn't work with the ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 card in the T60p. I didn't bother with a more recent version since the current work around requires the ChipId 0x71c5 in the xorg.conf file to trick the driver into thinking you've got a Radeon X1300, and I'm willing to wait for a real driver to be released. Currently, I just have what Xorg -configure outputted, which uses vesa as its driver. The only annoying thing about it is I can't get overlays to work.

I didn't have any problems with this for a while, but the other day I restarted after compiling the kernel while experimenting with the ati drivers and the wired ethernet adapter is nowhere to be found. I looked through dmesg and got this:

The Intel support says to check the driver. So I check the driver by recompiling my kernel with e1000 as a module. When I modprobe, I get the same message. The Intel support then says to run diagnostics. I didn't know of any so I decided to take things into my own hands (WARNING, THIS COULD BE DANGEROUS). I opened up /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/e1000/e1000_main.c and commented out 2 lines in the block of code that checks the EEPROM:

        /* make sure the EEPROM is good */

        if (e1000_validate_eeprom_checksum(&adapter->hw) < 0) {
                DPRINTK(PROBE, ERR, "The EEPROM Checksum Is Not Valid\n");
/*              err = -EIO;
                goto err_eeprom;
*/      }

This way, I'll still get the error message in dmesg, but the driver loads successfully, and gigabit ethernet works again. I know that this is dodgy, but I was impatient as there were other things that I wanted to deal with.

With the Bluetooth subsystem compiled into the kernel as well as the bluez packages, everything seems to work. When I turn on the bluetooth device (Fn + F5), /etc/init.d/bluetooth automatically starts and I can scan devices. When I turn off the bluetooth device, /etc/init.d/bluetooth automatically shuts down. I haven't had the chance to talk to another device or transfer any files yet.

I disabled all the CPU frequency scaling and suspend/hibernate, so I'm not sure if that stuff works correctly. The ibm acpi controls are definitely working (light, beep, display, bay, etc...), but I'm not sure if it's tied to the hotplug agent correctly. I don't have another Ultrabay device to test this on.

The USB seems to be working without any tweaking. I was able to connect an iPod up to the T60p, mount it, and copy files to/from it. I was also able to connect to multiple different digital cameras and mount them as scsi devices.

Not tested yet.

Not tested yet.

Not tested yet.

Not tested yet.

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This page was last updated on: Aug 29 2007