[PLUG] Thinkpad OEM adventures

[Carla Schroder]

This may be helpful to some of you- 

Scenario: Shiny new IBM Thinkpad R32, with built-in wi-fi, modem, sound, and 
Ethernet.
Everything is supported in Linux except the #$@!$$ modem- dammit IBM, would it 
KILL you to use one of the many modems that are supported in Linux? What did 
you spend that billion Linux bucks on, anyway?

Ok. Preloaded with XP Pro, which I want because my clients use it, so I 
probably ought to look at it or something. No software disks came with it. 
Nope not one. It has a sekrit recovery partition on the hard drive, which 
eats up about 1.5 gigabytes. I call and request a recovery CD, which they 
ship for free.

My plan was to use Knoppix to shrink the NTFS partition, then install some 
flavor o Linux and dual-boot. Knoppix comes with QTParted, which is a great 
GUI front-end to parted and ntfs-resize. That's right, it resizes NTFS 
partitions non-destructively. Yay, like Partition Magic, only free.

Well a curious thing happened with winduhs. QTParted said I needed to defrag. 
Brand new and never touched- but oh well. I fire up XP and do a defrag. It 
was still no good- the dirty bugger parked a couple of files waaaay down at 
the end of the drive, so it still took up the entire hard drive. Maybe there 
is a clever way to move these files without paying for something like 
Speeddisk, but I do not know what it is. 

So I used Knoppix to delete all the partitions, including the recovery 
partition, and create a winderz partition and a linux partition. Then when I 
ran the recovery CD, windows is confined to a 6-gigabyte cell, and the rest 
is for Linux. 

lspci is your very good friend for determining chipsets, which you need to 
know to choose Linux drivers. IBM won't tell you. (dear IBM, regarding your 
great love for Linux, there seems to be a gap or two...) The sound chip and 
modem apparently share the same IRQ, I imagine windoze has some sort of 
clever hack to manage this, but as far as I can tell the modem won't work in 
Linux at all. (Agere AC 97, formerly Lucent, prolly something else next week)

Moral: no matter how many scammy tricks microsoft tries to pull, no matter how 
chicken hardware vendors are to support Linux, our brilliant Linux 
programmers foil them again and again. Thank you very much, folks!

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Carla Schroder
www.tuxcomputing.com
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