IBM ThinkPad T43 - Archive

As the Debian Sarge installation CD/DVD doesn't come with suitable drivers for the SATA chipset or the ethernet adaptor of the T43, I had to use a snapshot of Etch in order to be able to install without problems.

• Download the i386 netinstall image from here, burn it to a CD and boot from it.
• At the boot prompt select expert26 or kernel26
• When asked for modules to enable, first disable ata-piix, then let the installer detect the optical drive, then at the next prompt for modules to enable reenable ata-piix¹⁾ (This might seem a little bit weird, but is important in order to make the installer able to detect the optical drive at all)
• If you want to keep the preloaded Windows XP installation on your ThinkPad, be sure to adjust the hard disk partioning to just shrink Windows NTFS partition. Of the 80GB harddisk space in my system I let Windows keep 20GB, gave 20GB to a Fat32 partition accessible by both Windows and Linux (making it easy to shift files between both OS), made a 1.5GB swap partition and gave the rest to a Linux Ext3 partition mounted at /.

After this, just follow the normal installation process.

Kernel 2.6.14 needs some patch in order to properly work on the T43:

• Fast IRDA support
  This patch is available at http://shamrock.dyndns.org/~ln/linux/.
  Download: nsc-ircc-pnp.2.6.12.diff.txt
• SATA Suspend-to-RAM
  By default, Linux freezes upon the first harddisk access after a suspend-to-RAM. This is due to the inability of the sata driver to handle suspend/resume. A patch originally published at http://shamrock.dyndns.org/~ln/linux/ and in a 2.6.14 version available in a lkml-post at http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/9/23/97 fixes the problem.
  Download: sata_pm.2.6.14.diff.txt
• LibATA S.M.A.R.T. support
  Without the libata_passthru patch available at http://rtr.ca/dell_i9300/kernel/kernel-2.6.14/, there is no S.M.A.R.T. support on the harddisk at /dev/sda, and a hdparm -I /dev/sda reports an error. Applying the patch enabled S.M.A.R.T. and also the info output of hdparm.
  Download: libata_passthru.2.6.14.diff.txt

config-2.6.14.2.txt