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Installing Sidux (Debian Sid) onLenovo/IBM Thinkpad X61s

Last updated: 2 August 2007

General Hardware Specifications of X61s:

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
Core2Duo L7300, 1.4 Ghz.	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
12.1 XGA TFT Display	Works	Select Generic LCD Display in Installer
Intel onboard i915	Works	Select vesa or i915 driver
1Gb, DDR2 PC2-5300	Works	No special procedure required during installation
120 GB SATA Hard Drive	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Integrated Network Card	Works	Standard e1000 driver
Internal modem	Works	Linuxant driver; HSF modem (paid)
Bluetooth device	Works	Standard bluetooth drivers
Intel 3945 Wireless Networking (Wi-Fi Certified), 802.11a/b/g	Works	Use either ipw3945d or the new iwl3945 driver; with the last one, the wireless led doesn't work (yet)
28 WHr Lithium-Ion Battery	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Intel HDA, with AD1984 codec	Works	Not part of the current alsa driver (1.0.14); a built of the HG (development version) is needed to get this working

~~This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.21-smp~~

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.22.1-smp

Basic Installation of Sidux:

I chose Sidux as I wanted to have a nice current distro (also because of the current hardware), but I wanted some more support and testing done on it than just plain Debian Sid. Besides that, Sidux is probably one of the quickest booting and running distro's available at the moment. Package management is easy and updates are frequently available/

To obtain Sidux, go to: http://sidux.com and download the latest ISO of your choice. I chose conservatively, and went for a 32-bit large install with OpenOffice.

The system was booted on an external USB DVDrw drive, with an additional "noapic" setting as otherwise the DVD device would not get properly initialised.
Installing was a breeze. I just emptied out the whole disk. Yes, no more Vista (hurray!!!). After that I repartitioned. Keep one thing in mind with partitioning: you have to keep the first 1Mb of your harddisk unpartitioned as that is used by the BIOS!!!
Next I just followed the installers pointers and that was it.

After installing I added the wireless driver from the non-free sources (so a network cable is needed during this part of the install).

Setting up additional features for Sidux

~~I did need the "acpi_sleep=s3_bios" boot parameter set up for hibernation to work.~~
Getting Suspend-to-Disk to operate correctly was easy. I just installed "hibernate" and it all worked out of the box (you need a swap partition for this!)
~~Suspend-to-Ram is a different matter. So far I can get it to sleep (with hibernate, uwsusp, s2ram), but it won't wake up correctly any more.~~
I also installed tpb and on-screen-display of the thinpad buttons. Unfortunatly not everything works (yet); muting works, thinklight works but all the other functions only display on screen without having an actual change in the notebooks behaviour.
Sound, as mentioned, does not work out of the box. It is actually to blame on the AD1984 codec chip that is not yet fully suported. I downloaded the latest (11-7-2007) HG version of the alsa-driver package, did a "./configure", "make" and "make install-modules" (actually I also made a .deb package here a "dpkg -i -force-all <packagename>" is needed as you overwrite the alsa modules that came with the kernel!). With this new driver, sound just works.

Unresolved issues

~~Suspend-to-Ram doe not work (so if anyone has this working, please tell me how!)~~
As of kernel 2.6.22, suspend to ram works with "s2ram", which is part of uswsusp in Debian. With "s2ram -f -a1" all is well.
Suspend to disk works. Make sure you have a large enough swap space! (same as RAM)
More thinkpad buttons need to work.Some other programme than tpb might be the solution here, but I haven't really looked into that. For now, sound, brightness ~~(and after BIOS update to 1.0.6, also the Fn-susp etc..)~~, won't work, not even with the newest devel version of thinkpad-acpi. Install acpi-support (at least that's what it's called in Debian), to get the suspend, hibernate, and wireless buttons work again.
Don't use boot parameters like "irqpoll"; they might help getting all USB devices recognised, but they also play havoc on your wired adapter. Loosing an USB port is not that much of an issue and should be solved in a newer kernel version.

Contact Information (Optional)

see guestbook at: http://hjh.passys.nl/PHPbbBook. You can also leave me a note there.
A potentially more updated copy of this document is here

Links:

Look at the T60 and X60 resources on http://www.linux-on-laptops.com; they can be helpful as the config is in some ways comparable.
Information on the T61; a machine that seems to be closest in spec to the X61 Etch_on_Thinkpad_T61.

In general the X61s is a great machine. Almost everything works out of the box and is supported. Besides that it's light, quick and has a long battery life. The case is sturdy and there are enough ways to connect it to other devices. The only thing that is sort of missing, is a cd/dvd drive, but to be honest, I'd have no idea where to put that, it's just too small.

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