The thinkpad X40 is one of the most popular and well supported laptops for running Linux. This page will be pretty small, therefore. I want to just write what is necessary to get Debian GNU/Linux up and running on one, with the hardware working.

Gah, dock support is a bit rubbish now. See ./dock/.

Notes / Todo

• debian installation
  • netboot
    • a one-size-fits-all netboot .deb
• other bits
  • battery magic (thinkwiki)

Installation

The X40 does not come with an optical drive, so CD or DVD images are out of the question unless you also own a docking station and optical drive attachment.

The two other options open to you are

• network/PXE boot
• boot from a USB device

I didn’t have any luck with the USB option (I think some of the instructions I was following made assumptions about block sizes and the like). The network/PXE boot solution worked, although I think the docs could use some refining (and you must avoid the tftpd package, use tftpd-hpa instead).

Video

i810 ; X driver in xfree86; needs AGP in kernel to have > 8MB ram; needed for GLX and/or larger resolutions than 1024x768.

There’s a crasher bug with xv and suspend/resume: possibly solveable. Triggered by using ffplay on an AVI file. Works prior to a suspend/resume cycle. See this launchpad bug for details and potential workarounds.

I haven’t been hit by this bug in etch, though.

SD Card reader

You need the SDCHI driver which is present in kernel versions 2.6.17-rc1 and above. The first stable kernel with it in is 2.6.17. Set MMC_SDHCI to M.

This module is loaded automatically by hotplug when you insert a card as long as you have mmc_block loaded. Cards show up as /dev/mmcblkNp1 (where N >= 0).

You should add mmc_block to /etc/modules to have it auto-modprobed on boot.

If you want better transfer speeds and suppor for large-block cards (e.g. 1GB+), check out the sdhci-devel mailing list for a patchset that came out after the .17 kernel.

See also

I blog about the x40 in it’s own category.

External links

Check out thinkwiki.org and join the linux-thinkpad mailing list .