IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T20, T21, T22, T23 full install 4.3.1

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dpeter508
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Joined: Sat 09 Jan 2010, 17:48

IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T20, T21, T22, T23 full install 4.3.1

#1 Post by dpeter508 »

I finished installing puppy 4.3.1 to my old T22 Thinkpad, and I thought I'd tell users how I did it to avoid the pitfalls I found.

The Thinkpad T20, T21, T22, and T23 were all basically the same except for CPU speed, so these instructions should work for all of these variants (and maybe some other Thinkpads and even other laptops).

First, I found that you need to use liveCD with the kernel version 2.6.25.16. It may work with the latest kernel for a while, but it kept locking up on me.

Also, do all of your initial installation with as little plugged into the USB or PCMCIA ports as possible. I used a PS/2 mouse, and it would work with my Zydas wifi dongle, but my Hawking wifi and my PCMCIA USB 2.0 card caused the computer to boot slowly and lag horribly. After installing the OS, I was able to use the PCMCIA with no trouble - just boot up and install it afterwards.

I realize that puppy is designed to be booted from USB, but I've had USB thumb drives fail before, and I happened to have a spare HD, so I decided to do a full install.

The tutorial here is what I followed, basically:
CatDude's excellent tutorial

I would like to add some details to that which are T2x specific.

When you first boot to the liveCD, hit F2 and enter in "puppy acpi=force" (without quotes) to get around the (in)famous "pup-431.sfs not found" error.

The liveCD will prompt you for which keyboard you are using, the timezone, etc. When the liveCD prompts come up, the important point is to use Xorg, select a screensize of 1024x768, and then choose a default screen of 1024x768, with 16-bit color depth (1024x768x16). This is the "safe choice" and even with other distros, 16-bit default color is what you must use to start with. The liveCD will allow 24-bit color, but it won't boot from HD with that choice for the first time. You can change it to 24-bit later.

When you run gparted, maximize it or stretch it so that the full menus are revealed. The hard drive has two partitions - one is the main Win98 partition, and the other one is the hidden recovery partition. Delete both and set up the main linux partition and the swap partition as shown in the tutorial. I used the ext3 format.

After booting to the hard drive for the first time, go to the menu (in the lower left corner) and select Document>Geany text editor. Open the file /boot/grub/menu.lst and change two things. First, find the line that starts with the work "kernel" and add "acpi=force" (without the quote marks). Next, find the line that says "timeout=30," remove the "#" from in front of it, and change it to say timeout =5 (or less). Finally, add "#" in front of the lines that have to do with creating a boot floppy or installing grub. This will make the system boot up automatically after 5 seconds, and set up the ACPI power save feature. When you're done, it should look like this:

Code: Select all

# GRUB configuration file '/boot/grub/menu.lst'.
# generated by 'grubconfig'.  Sat Jan  9 10:39:36 2010
#
# The backup copy of the MBR for drive '/dev/hda' is
# here '/boot/grub/mbr.hda.22745'.  You can restore it like this.
# dd if=/boot/grub/mbr.hda.22745 of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
#
# Start GRUB global section
# timeout 30
timeout 3
#default 0
color light-gray/blue black/light-gray
# End GRUB global section
# Linux bootable partition config begins
  title Linux (on /dev/hda1)
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 ro vga=normal acpi=force
# Linux bootable partition config ends
# title Install GRUB to floppy disk (on /dev/fd0)
# pause Insert a formatted floppy disk and press enter.
# root (hd0,0)
# setup (fd0)
# pause Press enter to continue.
# title Install GRUB to Linux partition (on /dev/hda1)
# root (hd0,0)
# setup (hd0,0)
# pause Press enter to continue.
# title -     For help press 'c', then type: 'help'
# root (hd0)
# title -     For usage examples, type: 'cat /boot/grub/usage.txt'
# root (hd0)

After you're done editing, have geany save the file.

Go back down to the Menu and select Setup>Xorg Video Wizard. When that boots up, choose "Edit xorg.conf." This will bring geany back up with the window configuration file. Scroll down to the bottom, to the Screen" and change the "DefaultDepth" and "Depth" lines from 16 to 24. Instead of changing the lines, you can use "#" to comment the original lines out and add duplicate lines with the new values, which is what I did. This is what the relevant section will look like afterwards:

Code: Select all

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Card0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
    #DefaultDepth 16
    DefaultDepth 24
    Subsection "Display"
        #Depth       16
        Depth       24
        Modes       "1024x768"
    EndSubsection
EndSection
Save the file in geany and close down geany.

Reboot the system.

It should now wait a few seconds and then boot to Linux automatically, and the colors should look much better (your icons will now be smoother).

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