Debian Linux on Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad R60e

Last update: October 14th, 2007

I will try to install Debian 4.0 (Etch). Pre-installed Windows will be erased (blahblah backup blahblah).

Important bit of information: yes, it works and even more, almost all hardware seems to be supported, including special Thinkpad stuff (but you need some manual work). Stability is good, sleeping works, and due to Intel graphics, there is no need for a proprietary driver. Installation is recommendable and quite easy.

Be sure to check ThinkWiki for refrence, I will more or less list distro specific traps and solutions here.

I also installed Etch on a Thinkpad Z60m.

Problems

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The brightness buttons are a bit strange (one hit makes them run to max/min brightness without stopping). I tried to fix it, but it's not yet perfect.

After awaking from suspend-to-RAM, the network is sometimes disabled after another few minutes and needs a manual kick to work properly again.

Overview

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Model:	???????
Part:	??????
CPU:	Celeron M, 1.73 GHz
Working out of the Box (only highlights):	X, SATA drives, Ethernet, DHCP, USB,
Working after some manual changes:	Suspend to RAM: some ugly patches, Suspend to disk: some ugly patches, Brightness buttons (sometimes): Some ugly changes, CPU frequency scaling: add some kernel modules,
Untested:	WLAN

Kernel Modules

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To enable CPU frequency scaling and some Thinkpad features, edit /etc/modules and add:

ibm_acpi
cpufreq_conservative
p4-clockmod

Brightness Controls

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The following lines were added to /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-laptop-panel-mgmt-policy.fdi, which sometimes make the brightness control behave normally:

<device>
  <match key="info.category" string="laptop_panel">
    <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:smbios.system.manufacturer" string="LENOVO">
      <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:smbios.system.version" string="ThinkPad R60e">
        <merge key="laptop_panel.brightness_in_hardware" type="bool">true</merge>
      </match>
    </match>
  </match>
</device>

Suspend

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Because Etch is four months old, the standard suspension package uswsusp does not know the laptop and refuses to work. Although manually on the command line, it seems to work quite well, I did not know how to provide extra params to s2ram from the gnome-power-manager scripts.

Therefore, I deinstalled uswsusp. Gnome then theoretically uses the simple echo mem > /sys/power/state to suspend the machine. This works, but the network is not working properly anymore. I found the tg3 driver needed to be removed. So I added the following script to the machine (as /usr/sbin/s2ram):

#! /bin/sh
(
/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod tg3
echo mem > /sys/power/state
modprobe tg3
/etc/init.d/networking start
) > /dev/null 2>&1

exit 0