Redhat-9.0 Linux on an IBM ThinkPad X24

This page describes how I got Redhat-9.0 up and running on my new Thinkpad. I'm still filling it in. You can contact me at

Preliminary

I installed on a seperate partition and used GRUB as the bootloader. Windoze XP was already installed and both boot fine now.

Starting the installation

I installed from cdrom using the dock. I had some serious problems with the console going blank after booting the kernel from the cdrom. I thought the machine had crashed until out of boredom I hit the return key a couple times and saw the cdrom spin. It wasn't crashed, the display was just in some weird mode. Anyway, I hit alt-F4 to toggle the video and, viola, it came back. The rest of the install proceeded normally, with occasional need for alt-F4 when it blanked. I did the graphic install because in text mode the bottom couple of lines were cut off from the screen. I never figured this part out, but the graphic install was fine.

Network install

Network Card
The internal network card works fine with the e100 driver.
Wireless Card
There is an internal wireless NIC with a Prism 2.5 chipset. I installed linux-wlan-ng and it works great.
VPN
At school I had to use a Cisco VPN with their vpnclient program, this presented some problems. I could connect to the network just fine through wlan0 running dhcp, but all network traffic would freeze with an error, like "1404>1356, frame too large". I tried changing the MTU in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 to a bigger number, but this just froze uploads. The final solution was to connect to the VPN and then set the MTU back to 1500 forcefully with "ip link set eth0 mtu 1500" Now it works great.

Kernel

I compiled my own 2.4.22 kernel. My .config is here.

XFree86

Sound

The default redhat 9.0 2.4.20-8 sound driver, i810_audio worked fine, but didn't work when I changed to the 2.4.22 kernel. I coulnd't get it to work and an attempt at a backport failed.
The solution for me was to switch to the ALSA drivers. I just followed the directions and all was well except for the driver crashing the machine on suspend. (see below).

Battery

At the moment I'm seeing battery life around 3.5 hours.

APM

Suspend worked fine until i went to kernel 2.4.22. Then it crashed.
The fix is to activate a feature in the redhat apmd to remove the sound driver on susped. Alter the file /etc/sysconfig/apmd and edit the lines to be something like this:

RESTORESOUND="yes"
RESTORESOUNDPROGS="yes"
SOUNDMODULES="snd-intel8x0"

I'm working on hibernation.

IRDA

Not interested really

USB

Haven't tried

Modem

Haven't tried

CD/DVD

Works out of box