Mark Alford's Fedora 10 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T23

Last modified 2010-May-31

My experiences with other thinkpads and older versions of Fedora/RedHat are available here.

Executive summary

Firewire card with ALi M5253 chipset (for video capture via kino) still doesn't work!

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Xorg and SuperSavage graphics card

   The default configuration of the display was 1024x768 at 24 bit depth ("millions of colors"). This led to slow playback in mplayer and xine. The fix is to configure the display ("system-config-display") to 16-bit depth ("thousands of colors").

2. Hibernation via BIOS

   Requires kernel option acpi=off (add this to the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.conf) and a specially-created hibernation file on a FAT partition. See my T23 FC2 notes. Once that file exists, BIOS-driven hibernation via the Fn-F12 key works.

3. Firewire video capture for kino

   The "new" firewire-ohci module still doesn't support Firewire cards with the ALi M5253 chipset. This is a long-standing kernel bug. To get this card to work, one must revert to the old firewire modules. Here is how to do it (all done as root).
   1. Make sure the ATrpms repository is available:

      rpm -Uvh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/atrpms-73.1-1.noarch.rpm
      

      but disable it by default (set enabled=0 in /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo).
   2. Make sure you have a recent kernel, since ATrpms packages typically require that.
   3. Install the necessary ATrpms packages:

      yum --disablerepo="*" --enablerepo=atrpms install ieee1394  ieee1394-kmdl
      

      This should get the right kernel module ieee1394-kmdl for your current kernel. If it doesn't, you might have to go to ATrpms and find the right one by hand.
   4. edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, and add

      blacklist firewire-ohci
      blacklist firewire_core
      blacklist ohci1394
      

   5. Plug in the firewire card. Then, to create the /dev/raw1394 device that kino wants,

      modprobe raw1394
      modprobe dv1394
      chmod a+rwx /dev/raw1394 
      

   Now you can plug your camera in to the firewire card and run kino. Under Edit->Preferences->IEEE1394 you should find your camera listed, and Capture should work.

4. Sound

   1. Pulseaudio does not seem to work on the T23. It gives jerky playback.

      yum remove pulseaudio
      

   2. Sound typically stops working after hibernation. This is fixed by reloading the sound module on resume. Firstly, set RESTORESOUND="yes" in /etc/sysconfig/apmd. Secondly, after awakening from hibernation, run the following script, which unmutes sound and turns the volume up.

      echo "Make sure sound volume is turned up..."
      alsaunmute
      amixer set Master 90%
      amixer set PCM 90%
      

      This is basically just reproducing what the old system-config-soundcard used to do.

Mark Alford's home page