Redhat Linux 9.0 on IBM T40p

This page is mostly a personal record of my (mis)adventures with my IBM T40. YMMV.

Purchase

IBM T40p (2373-96U) bought from LIBI Industries ($2770 Aug 03; they appear not to carry it anymore).

I chose this model because it had the Cisco Aironet 350 wireless LAN card (802.11b/Bluetooth), which at the time had the best Linux support (the IBM 802.11a/b card by Atheros is also supported now; see Walter Chang's T40 page) Overall I am moderately happy with this machine, but it's definitely a "price is no object" kind of toy. The battery life and weight/features ratio are impressive.

Update (3/04): The hard drive flaked out on me, causing intermittent lockups and blue screens. I only diagnosed the problem, with help from IBM, after I reinstalled the O/S (Windows) from the predesktop area and ran the predesktop diagnostics. After some wrangling they finally sent me a new drive, along with recovery CD's. I reinstalled everything but the lockups still happen, though less frequently. Very frustrating.

Update (9/04): I finally figured out the lockups. Turns out it wasn't the HD. It was a bad memory chip. I got a 512MB chip from CompUSA and replaced the internal chip underneath the keyboard (pretty easy to do, just read the manual), and it stopped freezing. The most annoying thing is that IBM phone service was of no help, and the PC Doctor tests showed no memory errors; only the Windows Crash Analysis tool occasionally indicated a RAM problem. IBM did give me a replacement chip so I now have 1GB of RAM.

Update (1/05): AC adapter stopped working. IBM sent replacement.

Update (2/05): Combo drive had been getting progressively flakier, had to keep reinserting discs many times to get it to work, and made odd noises. Finally quit altogether. IBM sent replacement.

Update (4/05): Battery stopped charging (worked fine on AC power). Bought another battery thinking my battery had died, but it wasn't that. IBM had to replace motherboard. Also got them to replace the keyboard while they were at it, had a couple of sticky keys.

Note to self (and anyone else who cares): Next time, buy a Fujitsu. My wife has had two of those and they have cause her NO trouble at all. Sheesh. Silver lining is, IBM tech support is usually pretty responsive and prompt.

Resources

T40 PAGES: Klaus Weidner -- Bill Wohler -- Carlo -- Ted Ts'o -- Fabrice Bellet -- Walter Chang -- Greg Meyer

T40 Hardware Manual

Windows XP Dual Boot Setup

After experimenting with VMware, I decided to return to a traditional dual boot.

Here is what I did (that finally worked): Hopefully you do not receive a "partition table unreadable" message like I did a couple of times before it somehow magically worked. Specifically, I tried installing from a DVD with a 2.4.20-9 kernel, and it failed twice. Then I did the above procedure and used a 3 CD set with a 2.4.20-8 kernel, and it worked. I have no idea why one worked and the other didn't.

Now the boot loader. Find a USB floppy drive, connect it, and boot into rescue mode using the install CD. Mount the drive with
mount -t msdos /dev/sda /mnt/floppy
Now follow the instructions here to set up the Windows boot loader to do a dual boot.

NTFS and Linux

See the Linux NTFS Project, which has rpm's to allow your machine to read files on the XP partition. Works great, but can't write yet.

Wireless

Thanks to Ian Pilcher, here is a source RPM for the Cisco Aironet 350 MiniPCI card, and the HOWTO.

A more general solution (which costs $$s) is Linuxant's driverloader, which allows any wireless card to work under Linux (including the Intel Centrino card).

Comments, Corrections, Questions

Romeel Davé

Last update April 23, 2005.