Fedora Core 2 on Thinkpad X22

Linux on Laptops

Contributed by Tedman

This is miscellaneous information about my experiences with setting up linux on my laptop (and some other computer info). It's here for my reference and well anyone else who wants to have a peek in case it helps them too.

My hardware is as follows

Thinkpad X22 laptop.
Sony SDM-S51 external LCD monitor.
External miniature usb optical mouse.
PCMCIA Netgear MA401 802.11b card.
External USB Yamaha CRW-70 cdrw drive.
Docking Station type 2631.
S3 Trio54V2/DX PCI video card.

The objective is to have an extended desktop on both monitors, both the trackpoint and external mouse working, the 802.11b card working, and well the CDRW I only really use for installation.

Back in the day of RH8.0 this was a royal pain in the butt, the good news is this is all very very simple now with FC2 - of course there is that one major glitch which will mess everything out if you don't know it...

The trick to installing everything and having it work is... to make sure everything is unplugged during the installation. i.e. the external monitor should be unplugged, the pcmcia card should be ejected, the optical mouse should not be plugged in. The installation will proceed smoothly with these things unplugged, if you have them plugged in it won't detect the dual monitor capability properly and won't detect the network cards properly and everything will totally mess up. Once installation is complete you can plug everything in and it will detect and run everything fine. The 802.11b card is easily configured using the built in GUI interface now, and the drivers are shipped with the package. The USB mouse will auto detect and will work at the same time as they built in track point. The external monitor even has a spanning desktop option in gnome now so you don't have to fuss with the X11 conf files manually anymore. FC2 uses ACPI instead of APM, this means, you can even use the power button to shut down properly now as well as control the CPU speed, the bad news is this version of ACPI doesn't support sleep or hibernate yet.

The not-so-good notes. Whom ever owns the lt modem code / rights or what ever, hasn't open sourced it. So you still need to go download the drivers and install them yourself. (see the links page). The boot up now goes graphical on you like windows.... to turn it off or better yet uninstall the package "rhgb" to get it back to normal. (for you windows xp users you add the boot option /sos to the startup parameters to get rid of the graphical boot). The system does funny things trying to detect my external monitor - basically it doesn't, so I have to set it to a generic lcd; however the confusing part is if you have the monitor plugged in during install (which you can't do or it won't figure out you have dual monitors) it will detect that it's a sony sdm-s51 properly. The good news is the generic LCD settings work just fine. I have experience occasional hangs during bootup - no errors no nothing at all. I can't rule out it's something I've done with my HW though, it may not entirely be FC2's fault. UDF writing is still not supported yet. SMB mounts are busted. Sleeping your HD still doesn't work properly as something keeps accessing the HD ever few seconds.

Other than the above... everything works smoothly and fairly quickly.

USB Digital Camera / external usb hard drives / CompactFlash cards

You will need to make the /mnt/* directory yourself for the bellow to work.
USB items on my laptop are mapped to /dev/sda1. The /etc/fstab mapping would look like :

        /dev/sda1       /mnt/usb      auto            defaults,user 0 0

Incidentally the above works for a usb external HD as well. There's a few catches as always. The usb port on the side of the X22 appears to have less power than the one in the back (even when running plugged into the AC) my usb drive only gets enough power to run when plugged into the back not the side. To fdisk and format the drive you'll need to use /sbin/fdisk and /sbin/mkfs.
The CF card slot on my laptop is mapped to /dev/hde1 The /etc/fstab mapping would look like :

        /dev/hde1       /mnt/cf      auto            defaults,user 0 0

USB CD-RW

Mounting an external usb cd-rw so it's readable, specifically the yamaha spider crw-70, just switch the file system type to udf. Writing to the cdrw is not yet supported... You will need to make the /mnt/cdrw directory yourself.

        /dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrw               udf     noauto,user     0 0

SMB Mounts

To mount a file system on linux across the internet. The /etc/fstab mapping would look like :

        //[server]/[share]      /mnt/smb      smbfs   defaults,user,noauto,username=[user],password=[password],uid=[user],gid=[user] 0 0

The uid and gid is so when you create new files they have a "normal" owner instead of nobody or something like that. Unfortunately something broke in the SMB provided with FC2 and well... it just doesn't work, I can't mount ant smbmounts anymore using any method.

Three monitors...

This is my attempt at getting 2 external monitors on my X22... that's 3 screens in total. So far the monitor and usb mouse seem to pass through the docking station without too many problems. On occasion it seems to boot up thinking that I only have 1 monitor - the external passed through one (adverse to the external pci one). It seems to fix it self when I reboot with the external monitor turned off at first (then turn it back on once it's booting). One of the USB ports doesn't work either. A web search shows I'm not the only one so I doubt it's my HW, there's 2 usb ports and the other one works fine (only one of the original laptop usb ports is unaccessible due ot the docking station, the other one still works fine so I still have 2 usb ports). So I finally got my PCI card... threw it into the docking station and... it doesn't work :(. Okay basically I can get it to work by setting in the bios to use the PCI card instead of the AGP card. The problem with this is that it uses it INSTEAD of the AGP card which means I get 1 video out put again. It seems like there's something in the bios preventing this from working properly. Incidentally I tried this on both Windows XP and Linux, neither could active the card properly when the AGP one was in use. I actually got a blue screen of death on windows tying to activate this - and that's pretty rare on XP. On both OS's it could identify the card properly and all but wouldn't allocate any resources to it... I don't know much more, I kinda gave up. My advice is... don't buy a docking station expecting it to get you 3 monitors, it probably won't work. If you do get it working, email me and let me know how.

Misc

ADSL Modem configuration for iinet.com.au and possibly other adsl providers in australia use the following :

                Encapsulation= PPPoE
                Multiplexing= LLC-based
                VPI #= 8
                VCI #= 35

In my case I have dsl modem/router in one and another router/802.11b access point in one. I want to turn the dsl modem into just a bridge or just a modem without a router, then I want to hook up the router/802.11b access point to the bridge/modem and then run all the traffic through the router/802.11b to access the internet.
My hardware is as follows

ZyXel Prestige 643 ADSL router.
Netgear MR314 Router with 802.11b access point.

On the ZyXel, text/telnet settings, on menu 1 and menu 11.1 turn bridging on. Then configure the NetGear as normal.

                      Menu 1 - General Setup

                 System Name= ZyXEL
                 Location=
                 Contact Person's Name=

                 Route IP= No
                 Route IPX= No
                 Bridge= Yes
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                  Menu 11.1 - Remote Node Profile
                                                                                
     Rem Node Name= iinet                 Route= IP
     Active= Yes                          Bridge= No
                                                                                
     Encapsulation= PPPoE                 Edit PPP Options= No
     Multiplexing= LLC-based              Rem IP Addr= 0.0.0.0
     Incoming:                            Edit IP/IPX/Bridge= No
       Rem Login=
       Rem Password= ********
     Outgoing:                            Session Options:
       My Login= tedman@iinet.net.au        Edit Filter Sets= No
       My Password= ********                PPPoE Idle Timeout(sec)= 0
       Authen= CHAP/PAP                     PPPoE Service Name= iinet
                                            Schedule Sets= 1

Site last updated : 2004-09-28

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