lacerus's Journal: Mandrake Linux 9.1 on Thinkpad R40e

Here I will share the experience gained during my quest for Mandrake 9.1 on my new Thinkpad R40e.

If you don't want XP on it at all - DON'T BOOT IT! It will convert the FAT32 to NTFS on the first boot. I set mine up to dual boot after PartitionMagicing the HDD.

These are the problems I had during installation (I will not write about the stuff that just worked):

• NumLock
  I am using a German Keyboard but I guess that doesn't matter. During Installation everything worked find but after the first boot into Mandrake, the NumLock is switched on and turning it off (Switch + Scroll Lock. Took me a while to figure that out!) only switches to cursor mode, but the alpha numerics never get activated.

  Solution: Booted Knoppix and renamed two executables: enable_num_lock and numlock (forgot the dir. 'find' them.) so the numlock service (is it a 'service'?) can't be started.

• Ethernet
  The Network Driver Module is _NOT_ the e100 or any other intel driver. It's the bcm5700 from the broadcom website. There is one in the 3rdparty dir too, but I believe it didn't work. Not sure though. Also interesting: this driver only works if loaded two times. Don't ask. I just put two "bcm5700" in my modules file.

• APM/ACPI Power Management... ... refuses to work. I have read _every_ newsgroup/mailinglist article and howto that contains APM or ACPI and linux and this is my current status:
  - APM won't even load (apm: bios not found)
  - ACPI won't load either (ACPI: Found ECDT \n ACPI: Could not use ECDT)

  -> Neither /proc/apm nor /proc/acpi have ever existed on my linux box. I have tried disabling APM and enabling ACPI (and the other way around) in a new kernel - no success. Tried messing with the APM kernel options (as described in some mailing lists) - no success. I'd appreciate it a lot, if someone could help me out!

• To be continued... (hopefully not)

• For our friendly robotic mates: network nic lan ethernet e100 broadcom on board linux thinkpad r40e motherboard driver acpi apm power management linux wont fuckin work