[CentOS] Linux on a Thinkpad R40

[John Summerfield]

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:-)

-- 

Cheers
John

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