SuSE Linux 8.0 on IBM T30 Thinkpad

SuSE 8.0 installs well on the T30, however, there are a few problems. Because some of them are interrelated, I strongly recommend that you read this entire document before making changes.

Note that I have a T30 model number 2366-92G. Depending on the exact model you have, your mileage may vary.

• The biggest problem initially is that after an apparently flawless install, the machine will not boot the installed kernel! The message "Loading linux" appears, then a row of dots, then - nothing. The reason is APM (Advanced Power Management). The installed kernel tries to enable power management at boot time, and this apparently causes the lockup. This is easy to fix by using a new kernel; until then, simply boot the "failsafe" kernel. If you don't want APM, you could just edit /etc/lilo.conf and swap the "failsafe" and "linux" stanzas, so that the failsafe system will boot by default. Remember to run "lilo -v" after editing lilo.conf!

  Alternatively, recompile and install a new kernel, making sure you set "Enable Advanced Power Management" to on and "Enable APM at boot time" to off. Put this line in the lilo stanza for the new kernel:

  append="acpismp=force"

• If you recompile the kernel, you will lose ALSA support. Replace it by obtaining and installing the Intel 810 ALSA sound driver from www.alsa-project.org. The instructions can be followed exactly and will work. Note however that you will need to rerun "make install" in the ALSA drivers directory after each kernel "make modules_install", because the latter clears out all non-kernel modules.

  You can get quick and dirty sound, with no ALSA support, by editing /etc/modules.conf. Locate the line mentioning snd-intel8x0. Comment out the two options lines immediately above it. Add this line after it:

  alias snd-intel8x0 i810_audio

  Then run "depmod -a".

• If you are using APM and ALSA sound, sound is not correctly resumed after a suspend. The workaround SuSE supplies is brutal - on suspend, kill all applications using sound and deinstall the sound subsystems, on resume restore the sound subsystems. There is a better way, at least for the T30.

  First make sure that apmd (APM monitor daemon) is running. This may be possible using YAST, but I just created appropriate links to the startup script in /etc/rc.d.

  Edit /etc/sysconfig/powermanagement and set the value of the variable APMD_STOP_SOUND_BEFORE_SUSPEND to "alsa". Then edit the file called /usr/sbin/apmd_proxy. Look for the above variable and comment out the two lines in the "alsa" case just below it. Look for the next occurrence of the variable and comment out the command in the "alsa" case, adding instead these two lines:

  /usr/sbin/alsactl power off 0
/usr/sbin/alsactl power on 0

• If, as I did, you simply blew away all partitions on your disk to install Linux, you will also have blown away the special partition used to write the machine's state to for "hibernation", also known as "suspend to disk". A normal suspend is a "suspend to RAM"; it reduces power requirements dramatically, but some power is still being used to support the RAM. With "suspend to disk", the entire machine state is written to disk, and power is then shut down entirely.

  To get suspend to disk working again, you will need a disk partition as large as your available RAM plus your video RAM. This may mean repartitioning your hard disk and/or reinstalling Linux :-(. Then obtain Andrew Tridgell's program tphdisk.c from http://www.samba.org/tridge, and compile it:

  cc tphdisk.c
mv a.out tphdisk

  Read the source or run the program with no arguments for further instructions. Once you have set up the disk partition as per Andrew's instructions (it's really very simple), the Fn-F12 key-combination will work, and your T30 will suspend to disk.

• The link /dev/cdrom points to /dev/hdc after installing. This doesn't work :-) To let things like cdplayers and grip operate correctly, relink the CDROM drive to the correct SCSI device:
  rm /dev/cdrom
ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom

  Burning CDs using KcreateCD worked fine after this too. If you burn as non-root you may need to set the permissions approriately on /dev/scd0.

• The onboard wireless LAN interface is not detected at install time, so no support for it is installed. If you don't want to use the wireless LAN (or if you want to use a PCMCIA wireless LAN card) then you don't have to worry about this :-)

  Otherwise, get the hostap package from http://hostap.epitest.fi/releases and compile it. I used the 2002-12-10 release. Put the resulting modules in the directory /lib/modules/<build>/net. Add these lines to /etc/modules.conf:

  alias eth1 hostap_pci
post-install eth1 ip link set wlan0 name eth1

  Then run "depmod -a".

  The Cisco VPN client (version 3.7 at time of writing) expects interface names starting with "eth" or "ppp", and doesn't understand interface names that start with "wlan". The hostap driver creates interfaces that start with "wlan". That's why the post-install line is needed in /etc/modules.conf. Thanks to Cyrus Behroozi (behroozi@fas.harvard.edu) for the reason, and Vladimir Ivaschenko (hazard@hazard.maks.net) for the fix. If you are not using the Cisco VPN client, you don't really need the post-install command.

  An alternative, if for some reason you dont want to use the hostap drivers, is the Orinoco driver. All versions before 0.13b have problems with suspend/resume, but so far 0.13b seems to be working well. The Orinoco drivers register interface names that start with "eth". so the Cisco VPN client has no problem with them. SuSE 8.1 installs the Orinoco drivers by default, but an earlier version than 0.13b. I've had no problems with the hostap stuff, and several oddities with the Orinoco stuff, so I recommend using hostap.

You will need to create a configuration file for the wireless interface:

cd /etc/sysconfig/network
cp ifcfg.eth0 ifcfg.eth1

Then edit ifcfg-eth1 so it looks like this for DHCP:

BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
WIRELESS="yes"
STARTMODE="onboot"
WIRELESS_MODE="managed"
WIRELESS_ESSID="xxxx"
WIRELESS_KEY="yyyy"

or like this for a fixed address:

BOOTPROTO="static"
WIRELESS="yes"
STARTMODE="onboot"
NETWORK="192.168.1.0"
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
IPADDR="192.168.1.2"
BROADCAST="192.168.1.255"
WIRELESS_MODE="managed"
WIRELESS_ESSID="xxxx"
WIRELESS_KEY="yyyy"

Substitute appropriate IP information for the numbers shown here. Substitute the appropriate SSID for "xxxx" or leave it blank. Substitute your WEB key for "yyyy", or leave the line out altogether if you're not using WEP.

It is highly recommended that you configure at least 40-bit WEP, and preferably something better. Then tunnel everything over a VPN or ssh. Here's how to do it with ssh.

• Although they are already installed with SuSE 8.0, the hostap people recommend that you obtain, compile and install the latest wireless tools. If you do this, make sure to change the install prefix in the make file from /usr/local to /usr, otherwise the scripts under /etc/sysconfig/network will not find the programs or will use the old versions.
• The crappy winmodem built in to the T30 is, amazingly enough, workable! With the Smartlink AMR driver. Many thanks to Arief Mulya for this tip. I went to http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/packages/smartlink and downloaded the latest version (2.7.9 at the time). I followed the installation instructions, started minicom, and was connected in seconds. Kppp also worked flawlessly. Two small things: The driver complains that it doesn't support the modem; this warning can apparently be ignored. Secondly, the install points /dev/modem at the winmodem driver device, /dev/ttySL0, so watch out if you had it pointed anywhere else, like to ttyS0 for an external modem. [Note 28 June 2003: It has been reported that later versions of this driver don't work. I haven't tested any later versions myself.]
• The T30 graphics screen comes back fine after a suspend, but not after a simple screen-blank!

  The simplest solution is to do a suspend/resume cycle to restore the screen, but this is very slow. Alternatively, compile and install a new kernel, setting Advanced Power Management Support to "on" and "Enable console blanking using APM" to "off". Note that less power will be saved - normal X blanking routines don't stop the screen using power, they just stop it displaying anything. While this does partly work, I notice that my T30 sometimes blanks the screen anyway! Still, it's no more than a minor irritation.

• This isn't a problem at all, rather encouragement: When I plugged the IBM-supplied USB floppy disk drive into the first USB socket, inserted a formatted floppy disk, and (as root) did "mount -t msdos /dev/sda /mnt", it worked first time :-)

  I have also successfully attached a USB Microsoft Optimouse and a Sony Handycam (DCR-PC120E) via USB ("mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt"). It seems that USB works "out of the box", at least for some devices.

Unresolved issues

• I don't know how to enable the 3D features of the ATI Radeon graphics card.
• The e100 ethernet driver module doesn't survive a suspend/resume. Since I use almost exclusively wireless, I haven't done much research here, but I suspect that turning the card on and off over a suspend would do the trick here. Check out APMD_INTERFACES_TO_STOP in the file /etc/sysconfig/powermanagementi and let me know how you go :-) There are also newer and better drivers out there than the default e100 driver - they may give better results.
• Sometimes (well, pretty much always) the startup sequence hangs after assigning USB bus number one. It never hangs on a hard reboot, only on reset.
• Wireless interfaces don't go away after "network stop <interface>", "ifconfig <interface> down" is needed as well. This is a minor irritant, as one is not usually changing interfaces that often.
• If APM is used to blank the graphics screen (separately from a suspend), the screen doesn't come back properly.
• Just pressing the button turns the little Bluetooth light on, but no modules get loaded. The BlueZ modules (hci_uart, hci_usb etc) load OK when manually loaded, but I've so far been unable to use any of the tools successfully (hciattach etc). I think this is more my ignorance than any fault of the T30 or Linux.

SuSE Linux 8.2 on IBM T30 Thinkpad

I found the Linuxcare report on SuSE 8.0 and the T30 to be extremely useful, though not in itself enough to solve all these issues:

http://www.linuxcare.com/labs/certs/ibm/thinkpad/t30/index.epl

Linuxcare has some other reports on SuSE 8.1 and the latest Red Hat distributions.

The hostap home page has lots of information on the hostap driver specifically, but also lots of links to other stuff related to wireless networking. The answer to the Cisco VPN problem came out of the mailing list archives on this site.

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Page last updated 2 August 2003.