SpeedStep frequency scaling with powernowd

It appears that ubuntu does not properly detect the speedstep capability of the T22 thinkpad. To activate it, you have to load a module at startup by:
sudo gedit /etc/modules
then add this line to the end:
speedstep-lib relaxed_check=1
Now reboot, then right click on the top taskbar and click "add to panel", then choose "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor". You should see a new icon showing the CPU frequency, which varies from 700-900 MHz for my thinkpad.

Activating the scroll button

To activate the scroll button (big blue one!) on the thinkpad, you need to edit the xorg.conf file:
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Then add the following two lines just after "Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"":
Option "EmulateWheel "on"
Option "EmulateWheelButton "2"
Then reboot for the setting to take effect.

While you're editing this file, you can comment out (add # before) the InputDevice section for "Synaptics Touchpad" and the line in the ServerLayout section near the end of the file. I'm not sure if this has any effect, but the T22 does not have a touchpad!

Getting Java, MP3 and DVD playback

These are not included by default in Ubuntu (legal reasons), so follow the instructions on this page to install them:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats

I'd recommend Quod Libet for playing music and VLC for playing videos. For DVD playback you'll need to enable DMA access on your DVD drive. To do this, edit your hdparm.conf file by typing:

sudo gedit /etc/hdparm.conf

then add this to the end of the file:

/dev/hdc {
dma = on
}

Then save and reboot.

3D acceleration with the Savage IX chipset

I got 3D acceleration working today! The following steps were required (from http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75393):

1) Install the 686 kernel, 686 linux headers, 686 restricted modules, build-essential and gcc-3.4. Reboot after installing the new kernel.

2) enter the following commands (important: the 20050718 versions do not work properly):
wget http://dri.freedesktop.org/snapshots/common-20050714-linux.i386.tar.bz2
wget http://dri.freedesktop.org/snapshots/savage-20050714-linux.i386.tar.bz2
tar -xjf common-20050714-linux.i386.tar.bz2.tar
tar -xjf savage-20050714-linux.i386.tar.bz2.tar
cd dripkg
sudo ./install.sh

3) Now restart Ubuntu and run:
glxinfo
and make sure that "direct rendering: Yes"
when I run:
glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark
I get ~480 fps. Now try installing planetpenguin-racer!

P.S. The files linked to in this section are no longer available. If you email me (or post a comment here) I'll be happy to send them to you. Better still, if someone could host them, that would be great!

Installation

Installation of Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 went smoothly. It even detected my US Robotics 5410 PCMCIA wireless card (based on ACX 111 chipset), so there's no need for ndiswrapper on my thinkpad (though I do use this prog on my desktop, so I will be posting instructions for it anyway).

Here are my first few steps with ubuntu:

1) Install from i386 installation CD

2) Select System>Administration>Update Manager and click 'Reload'. This check the ubuntu repositories for the latest updates. Click 'Install' to download and apply the settings.

3) I noticed that the thinkpad would not shutdown. I understand this is a problem with ACPI in the T2x series, so to fix this, we need to change from ACPI to APM. To do this, open a terminal prompt, then:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
and change the line:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash
to:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash acpi=off apm=on
then save. To make sure these options stay there after kernel updates, change the line in the same file:
# kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro
to:
# kopt=root=/dev/hda1 roacpi=off apm=on

4) There are several other tweaks I made, including removing the bookmarks toolbar from firefox, changing the colour scheme and removing the beep sound from the terminal.

Ubuntu on T22: Aims

Here is my diary of setting up Ubuntu Linux on my IBM Thinkpad T22. I've been playing around with the Breezy Badger pre-release for the last few days, but I'm going to start again from scratch and write down here all the steps I took to get it running with full functionality. Here is what I will be attempting to do:

1) Get Ubuntu installed and booting, with some basic tweaks

2) Get my wireless PCMCIA network card working

3) Get the suspend function working

4) Enable speedstep CPU frequency scaling to improve battery life

5) Install audio and video players (should be easy according to www.ubuntuguide.org)

6) Get samba file sharing working so I can share files with my desktop and xbox

7) Enable 3D video acceleration by installing video drivers

8) Use S3switch to enable TV-out

9) Configure the thinkpad buttons using tpb and enable middle mouse button scrolling

10) Setup wine so I can run Guitar Pro (this involves getting MIDI working!) or just use DGuitar

11) Get my Echo Indigo IO PCMCIA soundcard working

This is the approximate order of priority. Hopefully within a couple of weeks, I will have everything up and running!

PS: A couple of details about my thinkpad: I have a 2647-4EG laptop with the latest 1.12 BIOS version installed. Before installation, I changed the BIOS setting for the CD/DVD reader from 'silent' to 'high' to speed up the installation. I also set my preferred speedstep settings in the BIOS, and I will try to check later if this is working properly in Ubuntu.