[ltp] Report: Gentoo on X60

[Dario Lopez-Kästen]

Hello,

I am happy to report that gentoo linux seems to be working quite well on 
  my brand new ThinkPad X60.

It is currently installing and compiling gnome, so I have not been able 
to try out everything. And it is fast.

Points of interest (off the top of my head):

* LiveCD 2006.0 works perfectly for booting, but the GUI Installer fails 
on randomly on different things. Sometimes it would not start etc. 
Consistenlty it failed on installing the GRUB bootloader.

Boooting the live CD and doing a manual install works perfectly.

* There are some issues with the built-in ethernet device being 
autodiscovered by the LiveCD as two different interfaces, but looking at 
the HW-address gives you a hint on which one to use. After that 
networking support works OK. In my case I had to use eth1 instead of eth0.

* If you get past the installation, the e1000 driver in the kernel works 
perfectly and the interface get's identified properly, so the above 
seems to be an issue with the LiveCD.

* Since the hardrive is a SATA disk, apart from enabling SATA properly 
in the kernel, you need to compile SCSI support into the kernel. Without 
SCSI it it will not find the root drive after booting.

* If you want framebuffer, do not use the vesafb-tng, I could not make 
it work. vesafb works perfectly.

* Built in wireless will not work probably, it is too early - the driver 
is a version 0.0.76 or so at the moment. You will have to use a standard 
PCMCIA card for that. I have an old Orinoco Silver - these work like a 
charm after emerging wireless-tools. No special tewking needed other 
than conf'ing network properly.

* There are drivers for the graphics system and the gigabit driver from 
the Intel download site. I have not tried these yet, and I have not 
tried X yet either.

* Use pentium-m as the processor type. The processor is a Centrino Core Duo.

* Use SMB - the processor behaves as two processors and it is really 
fast compiling gnome :-)

That's it - my gnome compile is finished now, so I'll go on configuring 
the machine.

I will report back as I get more of it working, but I think that 
following the info given by the T60 crowd will get my bluetooth and 
other devices up and running with out any serious hassle.

Cheers,

/dario

-- 
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Dario Lopez-Kästen, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech.
Lyrics applied to programming & application design:
"emancipate yourself from mental slavery" - redemption song, b. marley