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Well, I finally managed to install Archlinux on my laptop (Thinkpad X60s) this weekend. I have installed Archlinux on my two desktops computers at home and also on a Dell laptop (Inspiron 5200) in my lab without a glitch, but this one was an interesting challenge. I thought it might be worth sharing this experience in case others encounter similar issues.
The first issue that I encountered was a kernel panic when Archlinux Overlord (2008.06) tried to mount the external USB CD/DVD drive. Unfortunately, this laptop doesn't come with an internal CD/DVD drive, so I don't have too much options when it comes to installing an operating system on this machine. I tried to make a bootable USB Pen Drive by following the Arch wikis, but somehow I did not manage to do it properly. But fortunately, I was able to boot a liveCD of the previous version of Archlinux (2008.03). I basically selected all the packages, except those for the wireless: I only retained ndiswrapper and anything that had ipw3945, because this computer comes an Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection.
Once the installation was complete, I tried to do a full system upgrade, which resulted in the second problem I encountered: for some reasons, I couldn't get connected despite that eth0 was loaded. I tried to let dhcp handle the IP address and even set the IP address manually (one of my desktop uses dhcp and the other one uses a fixed IP address with Arch). But neither worked. It failed to connect to the default gateway on my router, which in my case is 192.168.1.1. So I went to work and connected the computer on that network, and there you go, I was able to ping google and fetch all the upgrades. So my guess is that for some reasons, the ethernet port cannot get a valid IP address while it is connected to the wired network with my router (this issue occurred with other distros as well, including Xubuntu Intrepid). So I'll try to connect directly through my internet connection without going through the router one of these days.
I cannot remember the order of the third and fourth issues, but they were both associated with package dependencies during the upgrade. One was related to klibc upgrade, which is a known issue and is easily solved by removing a symbolic link (rm /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm) that creates hundreds of false file conflicts. The other one was a dependency between the wireless driver ipw3945 with the 2.6.26 (?) kernel that prevented upgrading the Linux kernel to 2.6.27. Again the solution was not that difficult: I just removed the ipw3945 driver (pacman -R ipw3945), and then was able to do a full system upgrade and start installing xorg, LXDE, wicd and so on.
Everything is working perfectly now, except with one minor issue with wicd. For some reasons, if I set it to automatically connect to my home network with the wireless, it indicates that it is connected, but if I go on the web and try to load a page or google, it behaves as if it was not connected on the web. If I click on disconnect and then connect, everything is fine. So for now I have disabled the automatic connection, and connect manually each time I log on, which just takes a few seconds. I'll try to set a static IP address to see if this solves the issue at some point, or remove a component of LXDE that might cause a conflict with wicd (LXNM).
One thing that I have noticed too is that no UID were assigned to my drives in fstab. I do not know if this is because I specified in pacman.conf to not upgrade that file or because the initial installation was done with a previous Linux kernel (or both), but so far so good. Here's the content my my fstab:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/dvd /media/dvd auto ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/sda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda6 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda7 /home ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda1 /mnt/windows ntfs-3g defaults 0 0Hoping this will help other Thinkad users with Archlinux.
Ghoti 8)
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I cannot remember the order of the third and fourth issues, but they were both associated with package dependencies during the upgrade. One was related to klibc upgrade, which is a known issue and is easily solved by removing a symbolic link (rm /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm) that creates hundreds of false file conflicts.
I had the exact same problem on my X61, so just made it force the upgrade, and when I rebooted, I got a kernel panic. :-D. Should have done a search for the problem before being so hasty I suppose. When exams are over, I'll try a re-install...
Thanks for the info!
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