Archives: December 1999

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    [itemid] => 37
    [title] => Gentoo and an IBM T60p - Part 3: Networking
    [body] => Getting networking up and running on the T60p has been a mixed bag. On one hand, the wired connection was easy (expected). The wireless was at first REALLY flaky, then after some fiddling the connection at home (WEP) was functional, and as of now (when I'm finally posting this thing) it still doesn't work at work (LEAP). 
    [author] => erin
    [authorname] => Erin Schnabel
    [itime] => 2007-01-05 22:21:28
    [more] => Wired connection

I set the wired connection (using e1000 module) up with netplug so that it will figure out when the cable is and isn't there - it has the added bonus of scheduling net-dependent services at startup.



sys-apps/netplug-1.2.9-r3 




Wireless

For whatever reason, this laptop does not have an Intel wireless chipset. The Atheros AR5212¹ that it does have requires the madwifi driver. 

I also need WEP and LEAP, so I use wpa_supplicant as well.



net-wireless/wireless-tools-28
net-wireless/ieee80211-1.1.13-r1
net-wireless/madwifi-ng-0.9.2.1 
net-wireless/madwifi-ng-tools-0.9.2
net-wireless/wpa_supplicant-0.5.4




At first, wpa_supplicant would drop the connection after a few minutes. I couldn't find anything conclusive about why this was happening, but the one thing I did find suggested using the generic interface (wext) with wpa_supplicant rather than madwifi². No change.

When at home using WPA, the connection cycled frequently (sometimes as frequently as once every 4 or 5 minutes). When at work trying to use LEAP, it wouldn't correctly establish a connection at all. 

I think I was suffering from a known bug³, so I created some new ebuilds for the 1605 version of madwifi-ng. That seems to have improved the resilience of the connection considerably.

I still am having trouble with rotating through connections and associating via LEAP at work. I have been using ap_scan=2 because of hidden SSIDs in the office, the problem is that this forces profiles to be tried in order, and when wpa_cli fails on the first one, it seems not to automagically roll over to the next (which previous versions of wpa_supplicant did just fine.. )

I've found some evidence⁴ suggesting that ap_scan=2 won't work because madwifi-ng doesn't support it. Lovely. But! There is hope⁵ a patch was added to the madwifi driver at a later level than the one I had to revert to.

-- update 2007 Jan 5: madwifi-ng-0.9.2.1 should also include the association fix. I am now using madwifi-ng-0.9.2.1 (r1842), and that seems to work as well.

I haven't retried wireless at work recently. I'll post more when I do.

Footnotes / References :

¹ HARDWARE (Atheros) ar5212 [gentoo-wiki.com]

² wpa_supplicant + madwifi + hidden SSID

³ ThinkPad Z60t: moving from r1543 to r1757 madwifi stops working at all

⁴ ap_scan=2 problem?

⁵ Scan for non-ESSID-broadcasting access point always fails

Other References (of course):



MadWifi User Docs [madwifi.org]
Ubunto on X60s -- ndiswrapper for Atheros



    [authorid] => 1
    [authormail] => erinschnabel@gmail.com
    [authorurl] => http://ebullientworks.com/
    [category] => General
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Friday, 05 January 2007

Gentoo and an IBM T60p - Part 3: Networking

Getting networking up and running on the T60p has been a mixed bag. On one hand, the wired connection was easy (expected). The wireless was at first REALLY flaky, then after some fiddling the connection at home (WEP) was functional, and as of now (when I'm finally posting this thing) it still doesn't work at work (LEAP).

» Read More

posted by erin at 10:21 PM in General

(5 Comments)

tags: gentoo / thinkpad / T60p / linux / wifi

stdClass Object
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    [itemid] => 38
    [title] => Gentoo and an IBM T60p - Part 2: Dual Boot / NTFS
    [body] => I have what I tried below, but I eventually dropped the attempt. The Lenovo modules hung up VMWare any time I tried to boot it that way, and while I could mount the NTFS partition used by WinXP R/W with the tools below, I could not easily get WinXP to look at the lion's share of the drive. (My fault, really - if I weren't so attached to other filesystem types, I could probably have made this work).
    [author] => erin
    [authorname] => Erin Schnabel
    [itime] => 2007-01-05 21:39:45
    [more] => Dual Boot

My new-fangled laptop comes with XP Pro, and I don't have disks for re-installing that OS from scratch (in VMWare, for example). So, as an experiment, I decided to resize the WinXP partition, and put gentoo on the lion's share of the drive. I want to see if I can get a dual-boot OR VMWare image running off of that same base - because I think that would be cool¹. File access would be interesting - but that's another story; I want to see if it will work, first. As part of that effort, I also added support for R/W NTFS².



sys-fs/ntfsprogs-1.13.1




While poking around, I read up on NTFS³ - and I think, based on the interoperability section, that I'll also look into ntfs-3g. Note that this requires the freshest version of fuse, which means: don't compile CONFIG_FUSE_FS into your kernel. Either compile it as a module, or leave it out entirely.



sys-fs/fuse-2.6.0
sys-fs/ntfs3g-0.20061115-r1




Footnotes / References :

¹ Dual-boot with Grub [geocities.com/epark/linux/] , and Running VMWare on a Physical Partition

² HOWTO NTFS write with ntfsmount [gentoo-wiki.com]

³ NTFS [wikipedia.org]
    [authorid] => 1
    [authormail] => erinschnabel@gmail.com
    [authorurl] => http://ebullientworks.com/
    [category] => General
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Friday, 05 January 2007

Gentoo and an IBM T60p - Part 2: Dual Boot / NTFS

I have what I tried below, but I eventually dropped the attempt. The Lenovo modules hung up VMWare any time I tried to boot it that way, and while I could mount the NTFS partition used by WinXP R/W with the tools below, I could not easily get WinXP to look at the lion's share of the drive. (My fault, really - if I weren't so attached to other filesystem types, I could probably have made this work).

» Read More

posted by erin at 09:39 PM in General

tags: gentoo / thinkpad / T60p / VMWare / WinXP

stdClass Object ( [itemid] => 35 [title] => Gentoo and an IBM T60p - Part 1: Installation [body] =>

:bucket=2006-12-18-eyething.png:

Got a new T60 yay!, here's my brain dump on getting it to work with gentoo (2006.1).

See also (Updated as new parts are added):

[author] => erin [authorname] => Erin Schnabel [itime] => 2006-12-18 14:07:26 [more] =>

General 'fo:

Motherboard:	Lenovo ThinkPad T60 2613EJU¹
Processor:	Intel Core Duo T2600 (2.16GHz)²
Memory:	2 × 1G DDR2
Graphics Card:	ATI Mobility FireGL 256MB
Hard Drives:	100GB SATA 7200RPM
Sound Card:	Intel (ICH7) : ALSA hda-intel³
Wired:	Intel Corp. 82573L Gigabit
Wireless:	Atheros Communications AR5212 NIC

Installation

I followed the general install instructions for gentoo; no rocket science here. I used 2006.1/desktop profile, which sets a lot of handy use flags for you - what you have to do is unset those you don't want (like gnome or kde). In general, I try to keep the global flags list short(er) - though the default desktop profile pulls a lot of stuff in. I prefer setting use flags per package via the /etc/portage/package.use file.

added: acpi directfb dmx fbcon fuse gtk2 hdaps madwifi mmx motif opengl real samba smp sse sse2 svg syslog usb wifi

removed: -arts -apm -esd -gnome -ipv6 -kde -ldap -nls

Note: euse (from gentoolkit) is very useful here. Using euse -i you can tell: a) all of the packages that make use of a given flag and what they use it for, and b) whether or not it's included or excluded from the default profile or from your make.conf. Handy stuff.

I adjusted the grub install for Dual-boot, and did some checking for kernel options: a) ACPI configuration, b) removing DRM because of the ATI chipset (below), etc.

Just for the hell of it, I set up sSMTP to route to my gmail account⁴.

sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.18-r3
kernel .config

Pointing devices:

I decided to add drivers for the touchpad (we'll see how long it lasts - I'll probably end up disabling it via the BIOS..) and for using the mouse on(in? at?) the console. I didn't need to do anything special aside from emerging the packages (and in the case of gpm, starting the daemon via /etc/init.d/gpm).

x11-drivers/synaptics-0.14.5-r1
sys-libs/gpm-1.20.1-r5

On-Screen Display and Thinkpad things

For thinkpad buttons, I use tpb with the xosd use flag to enable on-screen display when you push things (like the volume buttons). After emerging tpb, update /etc/tpbrc per your preferences. Use the hdaps useflag with tm_smapi to enable 1/2 of automatic HD head parking function (the reading-the-data part).

For on-screen display to work w/ X, you have to start tpb when you start X, and it has to have access to the display, etc.

x11-libs/xosd-2.2.14-r1
app-laptop/tpb-0.6.4
app-laptop/tp_smapi-0.27
app-laptop/tpctl-4.17
script for starting tpb

Setting up X

This is the fun part. As noted above, the T60 uses an ATI FireGL graphics chipset, which means binary ATI drivers⁵. I grabbed the latest of both ati-drivers and ati-drivers-extra (with ~x86 for both in /etc/portage/package.keywords). The combination of use flags mentioned above were sufficient for both packages.

Note: ati-drivers-extra-8.30.3 required libXinerama when the qt use flag is enabled, even if qt did not use that flag. I had to emerge x11-libs/libXinerama for ati-drivers-extra to compile properly.

After emerging the package (followed by source /etc/profile to regen path strings), I copied the xorg.conf.example to xorg.conf (in /etc/X11) and used aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf to create an initial xorg.conf file. Then I updated the file to strip down what was in there - keeping the ATI stuff, and punting the extra stuff.

Without too much fooling around, X came up (with DRI and everything). The settings generated by aticonfig left a lot to X11 defaults. 1600×1200 at depth 24:

# xdpyinfo | grep resolution -A 1 -B 1
  dimensions: 1600x1200 pixels (301x221 millimeters)
  resolution: 135x138 dots per inch
  depths (7): 24, 1, 4, 8, 15, 16, 32

Now, I did check out sys-apps/ddcxinfo-knoppix, and I have to say it's pretty neat. It spat out all kinds of things about the TFT display. I've included the output in the list below.

x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.30.3-r1
x11-apps/ati-drivers-extra-8.30.3
x11-base/xorg-x11-7.1
xorg.conf
ddcxinfo-knoppix for T60p TFT display, ddcxinfo-knoppix monitor section

I did see the following message in Xorg.0.log: (EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory). According to the Modular X Migration guide:

Note: With modular installed, external drivers such as nvidia-glx and wacom as well as some vnc apps may not work if they install things to /usr/lib/modules instead of /usr/lib/xorg/modules. Many of these will have modular X detection added to the installation process ...

The ati-drivers ebuild does have such detection, and the requested library was installed in the new location (/usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri) however, it looks like the code trying to load the DLL is still expecting it in the old place? I tried the most obvious first.. create a symlink from the new location to the old. That seemed to really open things up.

# glxinfo
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
...
client glx vendor string: ATI
client glx version string: 1.3
...
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5200 Pentium 4 (SSE2) (FireGL) (GNU_ICD)
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6119 (8.30.3)

I still, however, saw an error message: AIGLX error: dlsym for __driCreateNewScreen_20050727 failed (/usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so: undefined symbol: __driCreateNewScreen_20050727. This seems not to harm anything, and the screen is so darn beautiful I just want to use it for awhile.

Sound

Why not. Sound next. In the kernal config, I enabled support for ALSA as modules. I enabled "Intel HD Audio" PCI Driver for the kernel-based hda-intel module. I didn't have to set up any of the dmix stuff I used to, as (I seem to remember reading) that's all built in these days. Everything "appears to function" right out of the box. Goodness!