Running Linux 2.6 and Fedora Core 2 / 3 on the IBM ThinkPad T41
Alex Fedosov

[ overview ] [ video ] [ frequency scaling ] [ suspend ] [ ACPI ] [ TV out ] [ other ]

Overview
I recently got a new laptop: IBM ThinkPad T41. As is always the case when running Linux (what else?) some things don't really work out of the box and thus require one to make extensive use of Google to figure out how to get everything working. This page documents everything I had to do to get various things working. My current distribution on the ThinkPad is Fedora Core 3 which runs 2.6 kernel. (I compiled my custom kernel from the stock 2.6.9 source.) Here's my kernel config for reference. A lot of things are the same between FC3 and FC2, the important differences are noted in the text.

Note about power management: because ACPI does a better job of power management than APM, I am not interested in anything to do with APM. Refer to Volker's page for a comparison of ACPI vs. APM.

Things that work out of the box

HardwareNameLinux kernel driver
Video cardATI Radeon Mobility 9000 M9radeon
Sound cardIntel ICH4 AC 97 audiosnd_intel8x0
USB 2.0Intel ICH4 USB2 EHCIehci_hcd
Gigabit EthernetIntel 82540EP Gigabite1000
Bluetooth?hci_usb
DVD / CD-RW driveUJDA755zDVD/CDRWide-cd
Pointing devicesSynaptics Touchpadpsmouse
PCMCIATexas Instruments PCI4520yenta_socket
WirelessAtheros AR5212 802.11abg NICath_pci from madwifi (get it out of CVS)
Infrared?nsc-ircc (see other)
ModemIntel ICH4 AC 97 modemsnd_intel8x0m and slmodem (see other)

Things that still need to be done

Links
http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/tp41setup.html
http://t41.zdenda.com/
http://theorie.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~arwagner/computer/T41p/
http://pmw.org/~gardnerj/Thinkpad/Install.html
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~vbraun/computing/T41/power.html
http://www.vynka.org/t41.html

Last modified Saturday December 11, 2004
Alex Fedosov
Department of Computer Science, University of San Francisco