TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones

Ubuntu 6.06 and now 7.04 on the IBM T41p Thinkpad


UPDATED 28 April 2007
I installed 7.04 the other day - works great, no problems, just the same as 6.06 but looks pretty.  I did find that the screen effects stopped working whne you installed ATI's GPU driver but one day I will instal Beryl and it won't really matter.

There seems to be a real absence of write ups on the installation of any Ubuntu version on the T41p, I hope this review gives people the courage to install it on there machine.  These laptops are find pieces of hardware.

The specs of my particular machine are as follows

The output when I run lspci is as follows.

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82855PM Processor to AGP Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 81)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M10 NT [FireGL Mobility T2] (rev 80)
0000:02:00.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI4520 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
0000:02:00.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI4520 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01)
0000:02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EP Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Mobile) (rev 03)
0000:02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)



So, how did the installation of Ubuntu 6.06 on my T41p go your are asking your self, well, in fact it went so well its amazed me.

I bought my new (well new to me) IBM Thinkpad T41p from one of the administrators on the thinkpad forums.  It is in very good condition and just a fraction of the price it was brand new (the price of these when new is simply horrifying, I saw a review which quoted the prices as being around AUD8000!!!).  Its much nicer than my old Samsung GT7000 series. Having said that my Samsung is old but it has never given me any problems.

Anyway the laptop arrived a week ago and I have been busy with university so didn't get around to installing Ubuntu on it till last night.

As luck would have it on Friday I received the discs I send away for from Canonical.  These are the 6.06.1 versions so I guess there are some changes between these and the first release of 6.06.

I have been using Ubuntu now since about January 2006.  I did this because slowly I was moving over to open source apps, first Firefox, then Thunderbird and then Openoffice.   So, in the end I thought "no more Microsoft" and decided to go Linux. One of my friends tried to persuade me to not go Linux as he considered the learning curve very steep (and I guess, as an IT prof he thought he was going to cop a lot of phone calls from me to help fix stuff).  It turns out it hasn't been all that bad, however, don't ask me about some of the problems I have had with my Mythtv dedicated setup, I am sure I am in debt to him for the help he gave on that one.

Back to the story.  First I booted into the BIOS and unprotected the R&R partition - I won't be needing that anymore!  I did however, make a set of the recovery disks just incase some nut wants the lap top one day with XP on it.

I ran the live CD and everything seemed fine so I clicked on the install button.

It gave me the option of letting the install take over the whole HDD so I selected that one.  Before I installed I read (and this is what I had already done on my old Ubuntu laptop install) that it is wise to create a separate  /home partition.  Not being sure how to do this on installation I read you could do it after the install so I thought I would give it a go.

So - after the installation I tried following the instructions on Psycocats website but it didn't seem to work (kept complaining that the /home drive isn't there or something) never mind, another installation should be fine.

The benefit of doing the installation again was that it was a lot faster - I guess the formatting of th HDD is the bit that takes so long.  This time I elected the manually partioning option and it gave me the options on how to assign the partitions between /, /home and swap.  That was easily configured the way I wanted so now I have and 8GB root, 2GB swap (I have 1.5GB RAM) and the rest of my HDD is /home (about 50GB)

After the second install I upgraded Firefox to 2.0 and installed all the updated (about 45).  I have also installed network manger which seems to be really slick.

What worked out of the box?

What doesn't or needs installing/fixing?

Final comments.

Well, it was so easy I can't believe it.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions.