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 ]

Infrared
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.


Modem
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 Trouble is, their spec file is outdated so I had to adjust a few things to get the RPMs to build properly.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
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.


Special ThinkPad buttons
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