Redhat 7.2 on a Thinkpad R30

by Helge Avlesen

Initial issues

IBM Thinkpad R30 comes preinstalled with Windows 2000 spread out over the 30GB disk... Which is a waste. However, it has been paid for, so we/I wanted to keep it, just in case. No Win2k CD's comes along, instead there is a dedicated partition on the disk containing enough info to recreate the whole C: drive. This recreation and fixing process can be started from the boot screen, which gives us a signal that it might not be such a good idea to write something on the MBR, like e.g. lilo or GRUB. Next problem: there is no floppy, only a CD-RW. So we cannot boot into DOS from a floppy making all the utilities in the DOS directory useless. I was lucky and had a commercial program called Partition Magic available. With this tool (use a recent version, 7.something) it is possible, from within win2k, to repartition the disk, in my case shrinking the win2k partition down to a few GB. Be careful clicking off the right box so that partition magic does not give all the freed space to the IBM service partition! After the actual resizing and moving of the Service partition, rebooting Windows2000 failed for me, it just hangs in the beginning. Turning the power off and then on again, the machine boots ok. While using Partition magic you may observe that the preinstalled filesystem for win2k is actually vfat32, mountable from linux! This makes it possible to very easily copy important files for the dual boot into the win2k partition, more on that later.

Installing

Boot the Redhat installation CD and choose text mode for the install. Choose generic PS/2 mouse with 3 buttons. Make sure you install GRUB on the linux partition, NOT the MBR if you like the above goals. With disk druid, make at least a 2*RAM sized swap partition, and some layout for the rest, e.g. Redhats default. Do not delete the two IBM partitions, one of them contains the win2k rescue stuff.

After choosing packages etc., the installer did not recognize the graphics card, so skip X configuration, and choose text mode (runlevel 3) as the default booting mode. Everything else goes smoothly.

Dual booting with win2k bootloader

After finishing the installation, boot into (the very useful!) rescue mode with the Redhat CD. Use fdisk to find which partition holds your root linux filesystem, in my case /dev/hda3. Now do

   dd if=/dev/hda3 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

This command copies the first 500 or so bytes of the linux root partition onto the file /bootsect.lnx

Now, assuming Win2k is on /dev/hda1

  mkdir /win
  mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /win
  cp /bootsect.lnx /win

Exit rescue mode and go into Win2k with

  exit

In Win2k, as administrator, edit the file c:\boot.ini. This file looks something like this (from a WinNT+linux HOWTO)

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation ...
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation ...

Now move bootsect.lnx to a directory called e.g. C:\Linux and add a line to boot.ini resulting in something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation ...
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation ...
C:\Linux\bootsect.lnx="Linux"

Reboot the system, and voila, there is an option to start linux on the very first screen! Choosing linux immediatly takes you into GRUB's friendly interface so that you after the normal booting of linux can proceed configuring X.

X configuration

Log in as root and start Xconfigurator. Choose the «Trident Cyber generic» driver, and «Generic laptop 1024x728» settings, let it autoprobe for depth etc. This should go perfectly, then agree to start X as the default. All three mouse buttons even work :) You can now set 5 as the default runlevel by editing /etc/inittab, the line

id:3:initdefault:

should be changed to

id:5:initdefault:

The rest

The internal Lucent AMR Softmodem is not supperted in linux, according to linmodems.org, but at least the basics are up and running; networking worked flawlessly, sound seem's to work (at least in the games I tried), CD burning works perfectly with the mkisofs and cdrecord commands. Not yet tested WLAN, but other pages for R30 says that linux support is ok. One funny thing was that /proc/cpuinfo reported the clock freq. to be 700MHz, 300 below what was paid for... Checking the BIOS I found the default setting to be «run at 700MHz when on DC, full speed when on battery». The opposite made more sense to me... I don't expect hibernation or suspending should work anymore, as all laptops I have used with the 2.4.x series of fails in that regard. There are, however, reports that at least supsending to memory work.