I've just acquired a use IBM Thinkpad R40 model 2722-GDM.
I'm contemplating what to run on it, and longer-term the likely candidates are: Centos 5 SLE{D,S} 10 OpenSUSE 10.2 Kubuntu - the latest. Kubuntu - Long Life (aka 6.04, Dapper, ...)
I've booted Knoppix 4 in it and most seems well, including the Atheros Wireless card Windows can't find.
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.
The problem is, I've done enough fiddling* over the years. I've built enough kernels, attaced enough configuration files with vim, and I want an OS that just works.
I'm sure RHEL 5 will not have a driver for my wireless, and I suspect not for my modem.
Now the point: do the auxilliary CentOS repos have the missing bits so that I can commit to CentOS4 (or even RHEL5 beta) in the short term, knowing that it's a simple upgrade later?
How will CentOS reflect the different RHEL 5 versions? Will it simply merge them into one product, or would one expect to choose different boot media? I ask this because I see SLED doesn't have some of the stuff I want - it's in SLES though, but then SLES doesn't have the madwifi stuff.
* There's fiddling and there's fiddling. I'm getting tired of doing the same fiddling all the time; it's time for new adventures.
Thanks for your time.
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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
On Tue, 13 Feb 2007 at 3:03pm, Max H. wrote
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.
In case the OP is not aware:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:R40
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.
I had no luck getting my Z61t to wake-up under FC5, but it works *very* well under FC6. I have to imagine, then, that it should work pretty well with CentOS5 as well, whereas it may not with CentOS4.
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Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
I had no luck getting my Z61t to wake-up under FC5, but it works *very* well under FC6. I have to imagine, then, that it should work pretty well with CentOS5 as well, whereas it may not with CentOS4.
My problem wasn't so much that it wouldn't go to sleep, but anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes after putting it to sleep, it would wake up while the lid was closed.
A few times it wouldn't wake up either. It would partially wake and then freeze, but mostly what I mentioned above. Thanks for your input on that, I'll be looking forward to it possibly working right out of the box without any messing around on CentOS 5.
Thanks, Joshua.
Max
Max H. wrote:
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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
That looks to be the one I found at thinkwiki; mine's 11a/g. I'm sure that as far as the software's concerned it's near enough the same.
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
I'd forgotten about that; OpenSUSE 10.0 suspended and resumed my Acer very nicely, ootb.
FC5 doesn't.
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.
I'm imagining that RHEL5 will be better in all respects than RHEL4, and like a refined FC6:-)
On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 22:28 +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
I've just acquired a use IBM Thinkpad R40 model 2722-GDM.
I'm contemplating what to run on it, and longer-term the likely candidates are: Centos 5 SLE{D,S} 10 OpenSUSE 10.2 Kubuntu - the latest. Kubuntu - Long Life (aka 6.04, Dapper, ...)
I've booted Knoppix 4 in it and most seems well, including the Atheros Wireless card Windows can't find.
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.
The problem is, I've done enough fiddling* over the years. I've built enough kernels, attaced enough configuration files with vim, and I want an OS that just works.
I'm sure RHEL 5 will not have a driver for my wireless, and I suspect not for my modem.
Now the point: do the auxilliary CentOS repos have the missing bits so that I can commit to CentOS4 (or even RHEL5 beta) in the short term, knowing that it's a simple upgrade later?
How will CentOS reflect the different RHEL 5 versions? Will it simply merge them into one product, or would one expect to choose different boot media? I ask this because I see SLED doesn't have some of the stuff I want - it's in SLES though, but then SLES doesn't have the madwifi stuff.
We currently think that we will have an OS repo that contains all the packages from Client/Workstation/Server ... and the Cluster and VM stuff as it exists as separate repos.
- There's fiddling and there's fiddling. I'm getting tired of doing the
same fiddling all the time; it's time for new adventures.
Thanks for your time.
Johnny Hughes wrote:
We currently think that we will have an OS repo that contains all the packages from Client/Workstation/Server ... and the Cluster and VM stuff as it exists as separate repos.
Johnny Before I wrote, I cast my eye over the contents of Client & Server, and listed the packages of most interest (kernel-releated) in order of size. Some appeared in three places: I expected Client and Server, of course, but also in Virtualization.
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John Summerfield -
Johnny Hughes -
Joshua Baker-LePain -
Max H.