IBM Z60m in Linux

I picked up a new IBM Z60m laptop at work. Here’s the rundown from trying to install Debian:

• Forget Sarge; it doesn’t support the wired or wireless network cards or the hard disk controller.
• Forget the Sarge+2.6.15 image with the internal CD-ROM drive; it doesn’t support it, though it finds the hard drive and the wired ethernet.
• Since I don’t have the 2.6.15 image on my USB drive, I pulled out the USB CD-ROM and installed from that.
• If you let the Debian installer partition for you, it leaves the 4.5GB restore partition. If you don’t want this, partition manually.
• After it installs, you’ll want to add the following your /etc/modules:
  • radeonfb
  • cpufreq_userspace
  • speedstep_centrino
• The console framebuffer comes out to a whopping 210×65 characters (1600×1050 pixels).
• Install powernowd to get the CPU scaling working properly.
• At 800mhz (the lowest SpeedStep) with the screen dimmed all the way, the battery gets about 3h:30m.
• You’ll need to put firmware for the IPW2200 driver in /lib/firmware; you can get it here.
• X is a real pain to get working. The ATI driver doesn’t seem to know about this card. The only way I managed was to disable the “dri” module and use the “fbdev” driver; I had to add an “fbset -depth 32″ at startup to get the color depth right.
• The CD-ROM/DVD drive is also a real trip. Edit /etc/mkinitramfs/modules and add:
  • libata atapi_enabled=1
• Then dpkg-reconfigure your kernel image module (”dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.16-1-686″ for me).
• This will let you mount CDs, but doesn’t seem to support the raw access needed by libdvdcss2. I still can’t play DVDs with this drive. libata ATAPI support is under active development, so hopefully this will clean up soon.