Since I have little time at hand these days one or two things may still have to be tweaked. However, everything works very well. I hope this is helpful.
]]>Edit: Actually, I had started working on a HOWTO site for Arch on this machine. I have collected some random info I could recall, but there were quite some things lacking, therefore I never put it up.
]]>I am very comfortable messing with the MBR. Everything works fine.
Edit: Oh yeah, the touchpad was a pain, because I had to switch to Synaptics-whatever to turn off the tap-click, and the settings were awful, and it wasn't fun restarting X just to test out the new sensitivity settings. It still isn't perfect, but good enough.
]]>I will try to summarize the procedure here.
The first step was to shrink the Vista partition, since there was no free space at all on the hard drive when I got it. I read somewhere that Vista uses a new version of NTFS, and that it would be a bad idea to try to use ntfstools/ntfsresize to shrink it. Instead, I used the tools available in the Control panel -> Administration. (Notice: I have a Swedish version of Vista and don't know what the tools are called in other versions.)
After that, it was time to prepare the pendrive. I used a formatting program from hp.com (using FORMAT in cmd did not work, maybe I missed something, and I could not find where to make it bootable in Control panel -> Administration). Then, I tried a lot of different live distros but ran into problems because of old kernels or other stuff on all of them. The savior was Knoppix. I put in syslinux + Knoppix 5.1 on the pendrive and it worked great.
Inside Knoppix, I followed a guide on the Arch wiki on installing Arch from inside another distro. I got some warnings/errors when installing and using pacman but they were not critical.
The final step was to make the system able to boot both Arch and Vista. I stumbled upon a tool called EasyBCD, and used it to set up my environment. EasyBCD uses Vista's boot manager and is very easy to configure. (Note: EasyBCD is not open source, but free as in free beer.)
I tried to set up NeoGrub that comes with EasyBCD for booting Arch, but I could not make it work. However, EasyBCD support both Grub and LILO, and making it work was just a matter of installing Grub on my Arch partition and pointing an EasyBCD entry to it. (Note: boot sector that is, not MBR, as it would overwrite the Vista boot loader!)
It would have been possible to use a pure Grub or LILO environment, but I felt a little uncomfortable messing with the MBR.
After this, it's only a matter of getting all hardware up and running.
I hope this can be of interest to someone. I'll try to keep an eye on this thread, but feel free to contact me at pilten at gmail dot com if there is any problems.
]]>Dusty
]]>At the very least the partitions will be set up ready for a sweet Arch 0.8 install ;-)
Go for it....
]]>Why do you need power management? Those thinkpads last forever. I run a crappy gateway 64bit with a three (?) cell battery that last 3 hours plus. The biggest factor in battery life that I've found is keeping the brightness of your LCD screen down. There should be controls on your keyboard for that. To suspend to disk just do:
echo "disk" >/sys/power/state
and to suspend to ram:
echo "standby" >/sys/power/state
Wireless is not difficult either. If you don't have a kernel module for it you'll have to use ndiswrapper which is a matter of finding the .inf file on your windows install. Usually manufacturers have all the drivers in one directory somewhere in the root. Once you find the drivers its just a few simple commands to ndiswrapper and you're on your way. The biggest thing with it is that it must be built against each kernel update you get. I've had kernel panics because I forgot to update ndiswrapper after a kernel update, watch out for that. You'll also need wireless-tools for using iwconfig and iwlist but arch has configs that do all that for you.
Not sure what you mean by configs for dual core. The kernel should handle all that fine. As far as makepkg is concerned I think you'll need to change -j2 to -j3.
Grab life by the balls and Just do it!
]]>uncomment community in /etc/pacman.conf
install ipw2200-fw (pacman -S ipw2200-fw)
install beyond kernel (pacman -S kernel26beyond)
edit /boot/grub/menu.lst
install xorg (pacman -S xorg)
install all xorg drivers (pacman -S xorg-input-drivers xorg-video-drivers)
install kde stuff (pacman -S kdebase kdeutils kdemultimedia kdeartwork)
install xorg fonts, 100dpi (pacman -S xorg-fonts-100dpi)
install fonts (pacman -S ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-dejavu ttf-ms-fonts)
install networkmanager and knetworkmanager, etc (pacman -S knetworkmanager)
install synaptics and libsynaptics (pacman -S synaptics libsynaptics)
install yakuake (pacman -S yakuake)
install fakeroot, python and versionpkg for aurbuild (pacman -S fakeroot versionpkg python)
install aurbuild (pull down from AUR and makepkg)
install katapult from AUR (aurbuild -s katapult)
install ksynaptics from AUR (aurbuild -s ksynaptics)
install cpufreqd and cpufrequtils (pacman -S cpufreqd cpufrequtils)
install hibernate script (pacman -S hibernate-script)
make group thinkpad (or whatever)
change the nvram line in /etv/udev/rules.d/udev.rules:
KERNEL=="nvram", NAME="misc/%k", SYMLINK+="%k", GROUP="thinkpad", MODE="0664"
add user to groups audio optical storage network thinkpad
run regionset on the drive to enable DVD viewing
This got me a system which had the minimum of things I'd need/want to run on a lappy.
]]>The intel IPW3954 Wlan card works fine, and in Kernell 2.6.22 the new open source driver from intel will included,without deamon.
My Battery live is ~6h with Windows and 5:30 with Linux, depend on what you doing;), but in the kernel 2.6.21 the Dynticks will give a little bit more lifetime, I hope...
I don't use lapptop mode, its a crap.... only use speedstepping, the Kernel ondemand works fine.
]]>My laptop also has hardware controls to control the monitor brightness and the wireless signal can be shut off - these two will give you a significant jump in battery life.
]]>As far as battery life:
My laptop on windows running itunes same playlist etc. would die at 55 or so minutes. Under linux with amarok it lasted 1hr 5 minutes or so, these are rough times as I did it while commuting, switching back and forth for a week and quite some time ago. But from numerous posts on this it appears to be back and forth some laptops are more efficient others are not. Or some programs are more efficient and other are not...
* snd-intel-hda was goofed a few kernels back so I had no sound (fixed now)
* wireless (as usual) is a pain... what card do you have? I opted out of the intel one for political reasons
Notes:
DO NOT turn off the modem in your bios. It shuts off audio too (go figure, eh?)
I'm currently using ndiswrapper, even though the wireless supports madwifi. It seems madwifi shows about a 50% signal strength when ndiswrapper shows 100%. madwifi also randomly drops the connection.