Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

The integrated wireless doesn’t work out of the box. Jim Hall’s instructions worked to fix that. There’s information on other useful stuff there. Don’t miss the link to Fedora Core 5 Tips and Tricks.

There were only two (bonehead) problems I had. The first is, you have to turn the wireless radio on with the switch on the left side of the front edge of the laptop base. My Thinkpad shipped with it off. Second, wireless won’t connect unless you manage to enter the correct SSID. Here are some other loose ends not mentioned in the instructions:

After you get the ipw3945d driver running, use system-config-network to edit the network security settings. Click on the device tab, then edit. Check “activate device when computer starts” and DHCP if you have it. Under wireless settings, enter your SSID and security key. Save the configuration and click activate.

If you use Jim’s wireless init script, put it in /etc/init.d and add execute permissions with chmod a+x /etc/init.d/wireless. Make sure it gets run at start up by running chkconfig --add wireless.

I finally replaced my i1472 with a new T60. Of course, I will put Fedora Core 5 on it, but first, the Windows XP partition has to be shrunken. The disk is 60GB (56GiB). Windows uses 51 GiB and the recovery partion 5GiB. On advice of a colleague, I created a GParted Live CD. The first time I booted it, it couldn’t find the hard drive. A reboot to BIOS (press F1 at startup) and a switch from AHCI to Compatibility mode (on the menu: Config/Serial ATA (SATA)/SATA Controller Mode Option) fixed it. I tried to find some docs on Lenovo’s site about this option but came up empty. A googling found some discussion about driver problems with AHCI and one guy said his disk is faster in compatibility mode!

I shrunk XP from 59.92 GiB to 16.00 GiB and laid out the rest of the disk thusly: