I got an IBM thinkpad A30 at work. It's huge, and probably the ugliest laptop I've seen singe the GRIDpad. Of course the first thing I wanted to do was install Linux. There's not a whole lot of info online, but this page is very useful: http://www.linuxcare.com/labs/certs/ibm/thinkpad/a30/suse72-config.epl also http://members.surfeu.at/m.koller/IBM-Thinkpad-A30-RedHat7.2.html

The Debian woody netinst CD's almost worked except the kernel locked up at boot time. To fix this you need to rebuild the CD using the 2.88MB 2.4-bk kernel image, and then everything works fine.

X version 4.1 doesn't have a driver that works with the graphics chip, but 4.2.0 does. Debian didn't have 4.2.0 packages so I had to install the binary image from the xfree86 website.

-- TobyCabot - 15 Mar 2002


This topic: Tech > TechNotes > HardwareTips > ThinkpadTips
Topic revision: r2 - 01 May 2002 - TobyCabot
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