Journal: Installing Mandrake 9.0 on my Thinkpad R40e

Here's my experience with my Thinkpad R40e and Mandrake 9.0.

I'm used to Red Hat, but for some reason it won't install. I'm getting used to Mandrake...

What I've done:

1. dual boot Windows XP/Mandrake 9.0
2. the guys who put the 30 Gb hard disk in my tp also partitioned it: 10 Gb for Windows, the rest stayed empty
3. Windows XP switches everything to NTFS instead of FAT once it's booted
4. however, Mandrake had no problems with that. I made a small /boot, /swap, a 8.8 Gb root, and the rest was put in /home
5. I hadn't read about the numlock yet (it's turned on automatically when you boot Mandrake, unless you tell it not to), but I had a lot of time, so I reinstalled Mandrake and explicitely told it not to run numlock. Before I did that, it was pretty comic, I couldn't even type my password, or the root's because even with the numlock turned off, I couldn't get the letters under the numbers...

I haven't tried much yet, since I've only had it a few days, and was hoping the beta version of the new Red Hat might install without problem (I actually had to take out the battery to turn the computer off once I'd started the installation. It stuck on the page where it asks whether it should test the cd...).

What works:

1. my palmpilot visor can sync, I looked at the page http://lespdas.free.fr/pdas/palms/visor_et_devfs.html and did the mknot thing to get a permanent ttyUSB0 and such. The modules were already enabled, so that's all I needed to do (the kernel is recent enough to support the visor)

2. sound: no problem, works right away

3. the network (LAN) works under windows, with the Broadcom card (see below)

I also have a Xircom Cardbus Ethernet 10/100 + Modem 56, which now works under Linux, via our LAN. What I did:

1. the pcmcia_cs package was not installed (!), so I installed it
2. in /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia, I put:

PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=yenta_socket
PCIC_OPTS=do_scan=0
CORE_OPTS=
CARDMGR_OPTS=-f

3. in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts, I commented out the "exclude irq 4" line. This was suggested in comp.os.linux.portable to someone who could not get her pcmcia to work. The remark was that in her case, the /var/log/messages showed that irq 4 was the only ISA interrupt that seemed to work for PCMCIA. By default, it is excluded in config.opts since it is often used by a standard serial port device. As I hadn't gotten it to work yet, I figured that I had nothing to lose by trying this too.

4. I used both the Mandrake Control Center and RedHat's netconf, so I don't really know which one worked in the end. For netconf, I told him to use dhcp, with
a. the module bcm5700 for eth0, which should be the inbuilt Broadcom NeXtreme Fast Ethernet card
b. the module xircom_bv for eth1, for my Xircom Cardbus Ethernet 10/100 + Modem 56 card that I still had from a previous laptop

Now I'm ready to put my files on this laptop, using our LAN, and get back to work. My last laptop, a Thinkpad 600, crashed about a month ago, when we got to our vacation destination. According to the technical service that looked at it, it was pretty much beyond repair, so I bought the R40e to replace it.