Fedora Core 5 on an IBM (lenovo) T60p

So, I just got my new IBM (lenovo) T60p laptop. It came preloaded with a bloated, vendor-hacked version of Windows, which I couldn't bear to leave on there. So, I busted out my FC5 CDs (all five of them) and got my install on. There were a number of devices which were must-haves from my perspective:

• Video: I had to have a good display revolution, but running ATI's drivers were not high on my requirement list


• Network: Both the Intel Pro 1000 (eth0) and the Intel Pro Wireless 9345 A/B/G wireless (eth1) had to be fully functional


• CPU: This beauty has the new Intel Duo processor, which means we get to run an smp kernel! WOOT!

So, here's how I got those guys working:

Video - This worked "out of the box." It doesn't use ATI's driver yet, but I get good video quality using the vesa driver, so I probably won't try to change unless I have a compelling reason.

Network - The wired interface worked right out of the box. The wireless was a pain in the /dev/null. The FC5 kernel comes with ieee80211 compiled in. We shouldn't mess with this, we will only mess it up. Trust me. After I installed, I 'yum update'ed which brought my kernel up to 2.6.16-1.2080_FC5smp. Luckily, I found an atrpms mirror that had RPMs for the ieee80211-kmdl and the ipw3945* items. So I grabbed and installed these rpms:

ipw3945d-1.7.18-1.at
ipw3945-ucode-1.13-1.at
ipw3945-kmdl-2.6.16-1.2080_FC5smp-0.0.74-4.rhfc5.at
ipw3945-0.0.74-4.rhfc5.at

Reboot and then run /sbin/ipw3945d. Now you should see a new interface (eth1 on my box). Viola! You can use your iwconfig tools to manage it just like it was a regular network interface.

On Screen Display -
http://www.nongnu.org/tpb/