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John Summerfield wrote:
I've just acquired a use IBM Thinkpad R40 model 2722-GDM.
The major flies in the ointment are the wireless and the inbuilt modem (Agere something). Google tells me the modem can be made to work, and I'm pretty sure from my Acer that the Atheros wifi also work with some minor fiddling: I've build the driver from source.
To address only the Atheros questions, yes it works, no CentOS doesn't spin up the drivers themselves. I have an R40 (2682-48U) and I don't build my own drivers, but you can get them in RPM form at the atrpms repo. Check out the Repos from the wiki if you want to know how to add atrpms.
Everytime there is a kernel upgrade, I just wait a few days until the new madwifi items are re-spun from the atrpms folks, and life has been good with my wireless for over 2 years now.
http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories
I've never fired up my modem, so I'm sure if it works or not. But I can tell you my Atheros chip functions.
rpm -qa | grep madwifi
madwifi-hal-kmdl-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL-0.9.2.1-29.el4.at madwifi-kmdl-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL-0.9.2.1-29.el4.at madwifi-0.9.2.1-29.el4.at
These would be the three packages you need from atrpms for it to load up your wireless. You can compare my model R40 with yours, and if you need any hardware comparisons, just let me know.
lspci -v for my Atheros shows:
02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5211 802.11ab NIC (rev 01) Subsystem: Unknown device 17ab:8310 Flags: fast Back2Back, medium devsel, IRQ 11 Memory at d0200000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
Aside from that, I've been extremely pleased with running CentOS on my R40. I get all the multimedia items from Dag. Xine works great for DVDs, and XMMS or mplayer for MP3s.
It's extremely stable for me. The only issues I've ever hard are the fact that I can't get my machine to wake up correctly when I try to put it to sleep, but I've never experimented much on getting it work either so it might be something simple. I know I'm not answering your questions about RHEL5, but I thought I would share my experience on my R40, and specifically mention you can get the RPMs for your wireless through the third-party repo.
Max