Callandor

I’m sick this weekend and don’t feel like writing much, so I’ll be brief. I’ll be doing a fresh install of Debian Squeeze (currently testing), found here, because my old install is getting broken, and I want to write down how I get things working on my Thinkpad R61 this time, both for myself and Google. I have a full-disk backup on my UltraBay hard drive. I’ll be going with the x64 version this time, and will be installing Lenny first, then upgrading, because I already have a Lenny CD, the torrent of the weekly squeeze images is unregistered, jigdo tells me “Aaargh – 0 files could not be downloaded. This should not happen!”, and HTTP goes at 50KB/s. I’ll limit this to Thinkpad-specific things.

Install: No issue. I chose to do it wired rather than load iwlwifi at install time.

Video: worked fine out of the box with the Intel driver.

Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

Upgrade to 6.0: No issue. Had to select linux-image-2.6.28-1.amd64 myself though, I guess linux-image-2.6-amd64 doesn’t provide that yet.

Sound: Worked out of the box, at least mp3s did after I installed audacious (my preferred player). HOLY CRAP – volume control works out of the box and with OSD too (only in gnome). In XFCE, I needed to put the following in ~/.xbindkeysrc and start xbindkeys:

#Volume+
"amixer sset Master 5%-"
    m:0x0 + c:174
        NoSymbol

#Volume-
"amixer sset Master 5%+"
    m:0x0 + c:176
    NoSymbol

#Toggle mute
"amixer sset Master toggle"
    m:0x0 + c:160
    NoSymbol

Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

Bright/Dim buttons: (Fn+Home/End) – HOLY CRAP, worked out of the box, with proper OSD as well (req. gnome-power-manager).

Suspend: HOLY CRAP worked first try.

Hibernate: WHOAMG worked first try, though not very verbosely.

Nicer-looking boot: vga=871

Wireless: aptitude install firmware-iwlwifi Then worked far better than it had before.

Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)

Java, Flash: aptitude install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin flashplugin-nonfree. Works, at least in FF.

Really, really easy, compared to my first install of Debian on this machine, where I had to compile ALSA myself. Also, this 64-bit thing is working really nicely so far. Now, I just need to wait for linux-kbuild-2.6.28 to appear so I can build kernel modules and play with VirtualBox.