Installing Fedora Core 6 on a Thinkpad T60 2623-D7U

Updated April 7, 2007

I got a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 in April, 2007 with Windows XP Pro preinstalled. I wanted to make this a dual-boot machine with Fedora Core 6.

Here are the specs:

• Intel Core Duo T2500 (2GHz)
• 1GB RAM (later upgraded to 2GB)
• 100GB 5400rpm SATA HD
• 14.1" 1400x1050 LCD
• 128MB ATI Radeon X1400
• CDRW/DVDRW Drive
• 1Gb Ethernet NIC
• Intel 3945 802.11abg
• WWAN
• Bluetooth/Modem
• Fingerprint reader

Here's what I did:

1) Get Windows XP up and running. I'm going to keep XP around and make this machine a dual-boot system, so the first step is getting XP up to date. I ran Windows Update (a few times), uninstalled any apps that came preinstalled which I was never going to use (you will probably find several), and installed some extra software I am going to need (Firefox, Photoshop and Office).

2) Compact the XP install. To prepare for adding a new partition for FC6, I ran a couple of built-in Windows utilities to get rid of unnecessary files (Disk Cleanup) and to defragment the disk (Disk Defragmenter). I am not entirely sure that running Disk Defragmenter was necessary, since I have read that gparted (see below) defrags as well, but better safe than sorry.

3) Order a copy of the original rescue disks. My machine didn't ship with rescue disks; instead, the data is installed on the hard drive in a hidden partition. Not wanting to lose that info, I wanted to burn a copy onto disk, but after an hour of searching Google to no avail, I gave up and called 800-426-7378 and spent $50 to order a set.

I returned to this problem the next day for no particular reason, and thanks to this post, I was able to create the disks manually. In short, Start > All Programs > ThinkVantage > Create Rescue and Recovery Media. I created the two product recovery disks on DVD. I'm a little disappointed that the IBM person I spoke with when ordering the disks didn't tell me about this built-in option. But that's what bad googling will get you these days.

4) Get a SystemRescueCd. I downloaded the most recent version and burned it onto CD. This disk contains the tools that do the hard work of resizing the Windows NTFS partition to make room for the FC6 install.

5) Repartition the drive. While in Windows, I inserted the SystemRescueCd (I'm using version 0.3.4) and rebooted. At the boot prompt, I hit "Enter". Running parted won't work, so I had to run gparted, which requires running X Window. To get X Window working, I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changed the driver from "ati" to "vesa". After startx, I ran gparted from the terminal window.

gparted should show two existing partitions: /dev/sda1 for the NTFS partition, and /dev/sda2 for the Thinkpad fat32 restore partition. Here's what to do: Select the NTFS partition, click "Resize/Move", and set the new size to what you need (I gave it 20GB leaving about 70GB for FC6). Click the "Apply" button, and you're done. Quit gparted and enter /sbin/reboot in the terminal window to reboot. Remove the CD when the system is down to boot into XP and confirm everything works.

XP did a disk consistency check at boot time. I got a couple of notifications after starting XP, but after another restart everything was clean. I spent another few hours setting up wireless and printers for XP with no problems.

6) Install FC6. I installed from CDs, and chose the graphical install. I skipped the media test. Everything went smoothly. The official install guide is a nice thing to have sitting in a browser window on another box while you do this step.

For partitioning, I chose the option to create the default setup on the disk's free space, and then checked the box to review or edit the setup. I editing the / mount point and assigned it 40,000MB, and then created a /home mount point and gave it the rest of the available space (28,608MB). A good reference for your options is here.

The big decision here was what to do about the boot loader, since I wanted to keep the XP recovery partition working. I ended up installing the GRUB bootloader in the master boot record (MBR), following the alternative method described here. The ThinkVantage button won't let you boot into the recovery partition at boot, but that partition will be listed on the GRUB screen, and you can boot into it from there. I found this a very acceptable compromise, especially since I expect to almost never be working in Windows on this machine.

When configuring date and time options, uncheck the "Systen ckock uses UTC" checkbox. According to this, XP will change the system clock back to local time, and this might "confuse" FC6.

With earlier versions of FC, I always did an "everything" install, which installed all available packages. That's not an option in this release, so I checked the three main application groups at the top (Office, Development, Web server), and chose the "Customize now" option. I changed only a few things on the next screen: added KDE under "Desktop Environments"; removed "GNOME Sofware Development" in "Development"; added "Mail Server" and "MySQL Database" in "Servers"; and added "System Tools" in "Base System". Since you can always add or remove packages later, you don't need to agonize too much over this part.

7) First-boot tasks. After rebooting, you're presented with a set of configuration steps to complete. For the firewall, I enabled it (even though I'm usually behind a Netgear router — I don't want to be unprotected when I go on the road), and chose to allow web traffic (ports 80 and 443) only. I disabled SELinux. For the sound test, make sure to set the volume to max.

8) Update FC6. When you reboot, you're running Gnome. To do a system update, do the following: Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal. su to root, run visudo, and give your user account root privileges. By now, pup (a graphical interface for the FC updater) should have alerted you that updates are waiting. I like the commandline tool yum (more progress feedback), so I quit pup and then did sudo killall yum-updatesd. After that, sudo yum update will work. Have a cup of coffee; this will take a while — I had 375 packages coming in at 700MB.

9) Configure yum. Unless you really love installing packages from source, use yum. To use yum well, follow these instructions on setting up your config.

10) Install wireless. I've seen a lot of differing notions about how to do this. I tried all the hard ones myself, and nothing worked. However, I then stumbled upon the "easy way", courtesy of an install log that I forgot to write down. Just a quick yum —enablerepo=atrpms install ipw3945 and you're done. I use a custom script to switch between networks, so I manually created /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 and then added the commands to the script to start the ipw3945 daemon. I added alias eth1 ipw3945 to /etc/modprobe.conf.

11) Install the ATI drivers. The ATI drivers offer significant preformance benefits over the default vesa driver. After installing the ATI driver, glxgears showed 3000 FPS, as opposed to only 1000 FPS before. Information on how to install the ATI driver is here, but beware — some of this information is outdated. For example, the tool named in step 7 doesn't exist; instead, there is a python script installed at /usr/sbin/livna-config-display that seems to do this job. This script also appears in the system menu.

12) Other random tasks. Not all of this is for you.

a) If you use ssh to bounce around from machine to machine, edit /etc/ssh/ssh_config and set ForwardAgent=yes.

b) I prefer KDE to the FC6 default of GNOME, so edit /etc/sysconfig/desktop to read: DESKTOP="KDE".

c) For a change, I'm going to boot into run level 5 (GUI), but I want my ssh key to be active in each terminal session. Add this code to the top of /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients:

if [ -z "$SSH_AGENT_PID" -a -x /usr/bin/ssh-agent ]
then
exec /usr/bin/ssh-agent $0 ${1+"$@"} < /dev/null
fi

if [ -r $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa ]
then
/usr/bin/ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa < /dev/null
fi

If you boot into run level 3, see this.

d) Install the flash plugin: yum install flash-plugin.

e) Using this guide, I installed standard MS web fonts.

f) Turn off uneeded services. Here are the only services I have running in init 5.

acpid
anacron
autofs
cpuspeed
crond
cups
fglrx
gpm
haldaemon
ip6tables
iptables
irqbalance
kudzu
lm_sensors
messagebus
mysqld
netfs
network
ntpd
readahead_early
readahead_later
smartd
syslog
xfs

My work requires MySQL, which is the only reason I have that turned on. I got guidance on what to have running here.

g) Add my printer. I have a Samsung ML-1450 attached to a XP box on my local network. Connected to CUPS in my browser (localhost:631) to add the printer, but Samsung wasn't in the list of "makes". I found a PPD file for the printer, used that instead, and everything worked fine.

h) Get my extra ThinkPad buttons working. yum install tpb. Now I can adjust the sound just using the laptop buttons. Use kmix (if you run KDE) to set the default volume level.

i) Set up a dual-head display. I have an extra 17 inch 1280x1024 monitor, and wanted to put it to good use. Since the ATI 1400 supports "Big Desktop", a Xinerama-like proprietary scheme to enlarge the available desktop area, I decided to give it a try. I went thru too many twists and turns to get it working, so please reference this xorg.conf file.

When switching to pure laptop mode (no external monitor), I type xrandr -s 1; to switch back, xrandr -s 0. Run xrandr to look at your options. I also see a bit of screen junk from time to time, but switching to a text console and back again fixes that: Ctl-Alt-F1, Ctl-Alt-F7.

j) Get more RAM. Crucial has a 2GB kit for $150 including shipping. What's not to love?

Everything I need to work does, but there are some things I haven't even attempted to figure out yet:

• Bluetooth
• Fingerprint scanner
• Suspend

Special thanks to Sam Tregar for figuring out the trickiness involved in the disk repartition step, and also providing a couple of other really helpful hints along the way.

This install log is linked from Linux on Laptops and TuxMobil.