I just found your guide to ubuntu on the Thinkpad. It is terrific. I could have used this year ago when I bit the bullet and decided to do a dual boot install of Linux on my T42. I didn’t much care for ubuntu at the time, so installed PCLOS 0.92, using the live-cd to resize the NTFS partition. I found that I couldn’t use the external monitor connection with a projector and I had a few other problems with the IBM volume control buttons and other bits and pieces I have since forgotten about. What I do remember was how leased I was to finally have Linux on my T42. Most things worked beautifully “out of the box” as they say. Because I wanted projector support, I blew away PCLOS and installed Kanotix, although with some trepidation. This went without a hitch and the volume control buttons worked, as did the projector connection (1024×768). A few weeks later I replaced Kanotix with Simply Mepis 3.4.3, again without a hitch. I replaced this with Simply Mepis 6.0 as soon as it was available. Everything seems to work “out of the box”, but now I am thinking of installing Kubuntu “Dapper Drake”, which I use on my desktops. Has anyone had experience with Dapper on a T42? Any problems I should know about before taking the plunge?

Thanks again for a terrific resource.

http://www.vollink.com/gary/deb_wifi.html

I would like to congratulate you for this useful guide. I´ve followed all the steps you mentioned and everything worked fine!.

Thanks,

All that’s left to do is to is to make sure that udev gives read/write permissions for the /dev/nvram device to all members of the nvram group. Make sure /etc/udev/permissions.d/udev.permissions has the following lines:
misc/nvram:root:nvram:660
nvram:root:nvram:660

I can´t find neither the permissions.d folder nor the udev.permissions file. Have they been renamed in Kubuntu? Is all i have to to to add those 2lines? In which file?

Thx for your help! Of course you can email me too. I would be very thankful.

/etc/acpi/prepare.sh

and remove the comments from:

# And then try to save some video state
if [ x$SAVE_VBE_STATE = "xtrue" ]; then
VBESTATE=`tempfile`
vbetool vbestate save >$VBESTATE;
fi

than suspend/hibernate will work correctly!

(from http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/ATI/Probleml%C3%B6sungen)

Have fun

In reverse — to remove the ATI fglrx driver if it isn’t working, this is what I did:

sudo apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx

Then:

sudo emacs /etc/modules
(or sudo vim /etc/modules)
(delete or comment out last line that says fglrx)

Then:
sudo sed -i -e ’s/”fglrx”/”ati”/’ /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then I rebooted the computer and X server works now.

Just need to figure out why it didn’t work the first time…

I typed:
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

Then:

echo fglrx | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Then:

sudo sed -i -e ’s/”ati”/”fglrx”/’ /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then rebooted and the desktop wouldn’t start.

How can I reverse it? Can’t you make sed automatically create a backup file? It might be a good idea to list the command that way on your site so that less-experienced people (like me) will have a backup :S

I’m slowly going through it with the man pages… remove the fglrx from the end of /etc/modules and I’m not sure exactly what to do with xorg.conf yet. Any tips?

Thanks