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 ]
Various miscellaneous things that don't fit in anywhere else.
[ infrared ]
[ modem ]
[ laptop mode ]
[ ThinkPad buttons ]
[ turning off the backlight ]
[ tpctl ]
Both SIR and FIR seem to work fine. For FIR, the driver you need
is nsc-ircc
which you can enable with:
<M> NSC PC87108/PC87338
Note that you need to enable ISA bus support for the above option to even
show up.
Some people say you need to pass the dongle_id=9
parameter
when loading the module, but for me it works without.
The modem is a soft modem, so you need slmodem
daemon to get it to work. You also have two choices for the actual
kernel driver: slamr
driver that comes with the slmodem
package, or snd_intel8x0m
that comes with the stock kernel
now. Enable it under Device Drivers --> Sound --> ALSA --> PCI
devices:
<M> Intel i8x0/MX440; AMD768/8111 modems (EXPERIMENTAL)
If you want to use the stock kernel driver, you need to say
SLMODEMD_OPTS="--alsa"
in /etc/sysconfig/slmodemd
.
For some reason, I could not get any sound out of the stock kernel driver.
With the slamr
driver, the modem volume is very low by default
so you need to increase it to hear anything useful. Unfortunately the
KDE mixer does not have a control for modem volume, so you need to run
alsamixer
from a terminal, move over to the 'phone' volume
control and increase it all the way. The modem device is
/dev/ttySL0
.
You can also build RPMs from the slmodem
package. Trouble is,
their spec file is outdated so I had to adjust a few things to get the RPMs
to build properly. You can grab my updated spec file
if you are interested.
laptop_mode
is a script that is "used to minimize the time
that the hard disk needs to be spun up, to conserve battery power on
laptops." You can get it from Documentation/laptop-mode.txt
in your linux kernel source directory. The file also includes a script to
run in response to AC adapter ACPI events that turns the laptop mode on and
off.
The ThinkPad has several special buttons for volume control, muting, and
display brightness. Although the buttons work out of the box, you don't see
any indication of volume level or display brightness. If you want to see an
on-screen display of either, you can install the tpb package. Download the
RPM from Dag Apt
Repository. This will also let you assign a
function to the otherwise useless "Access IBM" button.
Faking Fn-F3 for turning off the backlight |
With APM (or in Windows) pressing Fn-F3 turns off the LCD backlight. We can
accomplish the same in Linux using the program
radeontool by Frederick Dean. We can
combine it with tpb to assign the screen blanking
to the otherwise useless "Access IBM" (aka "ThinkPad") button.
(Fn-F3 would be ideal, but I am not sure how to capture it.) So in
/etc/tpbrc
, we need to say:
THINKPAD /etc/acpi/actions/standby.sh
and in /etc/acpi/actions/standby.sh
: (I am still hoping to have
this work through ACPI somewhow)
#!/bin/bash
RADEONTOOL='/usr/local/sbin/radeontool'
STATUS=`$RADEONTOOL light|awk '/The radeon backlight looks / {print $5}'`;
if [ $STATUS == "on" ] ; then
$RADEONTOOL light off
elif [ $STATUS == "off" ] ; then
$RADEONTOOL light on
fi
Credit for this script once again belongs to Alexander Wagner and his
T41p page.
Alternatively you can have the backlight turned off when your screen saver
activates, as dicussed on the radeontool page.
tpctl and configure-thinkpad |
tpctl (and its required kernel module, thinkpad) allows you to change the
ThinkPad's BIOS options without rebooting. configure-thinkpad is the GUI
version of the tool. They both seem to work fine, but if you are using
ACPI, none of the settings seem to have any effect, thus they are not too
interesting. In any case, you can download them from
Dag Apt Repository.
Last modified Monday August 02, 2004
Alex Fedosov
Department of Computer Science, University of San Francisco