The X22 is fantastic. Light, sturdy. I'm in love with it already. Of course, love only comes after spending massive amounts of time together and fighting through horrible installation problems.
I decided to buy the machine without a docking station etc since I'd really only need a CD-ROM for installations anyway. So this is an attempted install with no CD-ROM or floppy drive.
I've explained my entire machine setup below. A new X22 running Windows XP with Red Hat Linux 7.2. At the time of writing you just can't get much more cutting edge than that!
Be warned that this document is a little all over the place. I wanted to try and capture all the things I'd learned through the installation process to help others in a similar situation. The info on the net about this stuff currently seems quite disjointed.
Note that there are a lot of similarities between this notebook and the IBM Thinkpad T23. Once I worked that out I got a lot of useful info by doing web searches on the T23.
The 2000 installation from IBM runs very cleanly. First you note that it uses Win98 as the platform to start the installation. Interesting (and an omen).
All the network drivers etc work beautifully out of the box, as they should.
So, you can't boot linux from the machine to start the install. If you are a true maniac you might consider booting into the IBM service program and trying to get to a dos prompt. I've seen this, but it might have been when I managed to crash the service auto install at some point.
The only solution I could find to this problem was to remove the hard drive from the machine and do the installation elsewhere. This was suggested by someone with a Vaio. This is actually surprisingly simple to do. There are instructions for removing the hard disk in the manual, basically undo one screw and pull it out.
I plugged the hard disk into my old Mitac above for installation. Alternatively you can buy a 44 pin to 40 pin adaptor to put the notebook hard disk into your desktop machine.
You need to create a number of partitions:
If you don't want to run XP you can stick with 2000 by just resizing that partition instead.
In the end, the only process I could think of was to install Windows 98 first. I struggled with this, but all of the Linux installation tools seem to be written for use with DOS versions. After we have a working Windows 98 partition everything will be sweet, we can boot linux install images automatically, upgrade to Windows XP and so on.
Focus on the end result, not the means of getting there. :)
Just install Windows 98 in the normal way. You can either do a full install, or perhaps even just format that partition as a system drive. The important thing is that you get the dosutils directory from the Red Hat CD-ROM copied into the Windows 98 partition. It's what we are going to have to run for linux.
The best way to do a full Windows 98 install is by copying the entire CD onto the partition. That way you can put the hard disk back in your Thinkpad and run the install there reducing the driver problems etc. This is very new hardware and Windows 98 is quite old so don't expect networking etc to work.
I believe that at one point the built in Intel Pro/100 VE network card worked during the linux installation. But later it wouldn't work. I don't know why, perhaps it was 6am and I was delusional. I used my pcmcia network card to do the install in the end. This worked, you might have luck without it.
I leave the details of a linux network install to other people.
Don't expect X Windows or networking to play nicely out of the box.
When you try to start X Windows you should get a massive memory dump error:
Somewhere in all of that it tells you the name of the configuration file it was trying to use. For me that was:
Go to the Device section in that file and add the VideoRam 32768 line to make it look something like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI|Radeon Mobility M6 LY"
Driver "radeon"
VideoRam 32768
BoardName "Unknown"
Option "nodri"
EndSection
Try starting X windows again and like magic it should work.
The readme file from there describes the entire installation which is really simple once you get kernel source installed on the machine. Of course, since you still don't have networking you probably need to be using a pcmcia network card to do a lot of this work and copying. You can install the kernel source using the RPMS on the 2nd Red Hat CD. Use rpm --install on the kernel source package. Then copy and do the same for each dependency package until it will actually install. Don't worry, there are only about 5.
After that, compiling the driver is a snap. Then getting it to work is also simple. I have DHCP so I didn't even need the IP address that the Intel readme tells you to use. You might need to use eth1 if you have a pcmcia network card installed when you try this. I just moved the network connection over before running the ifconfig command.
insmod e100
ifconfig eth0
It works!
I haven't worked out how to get this to start automatically on boot, or even better as a hotplug device.
Here is the IBM page talking about the type of modem installed.
Here is more information about linmodems (the Linux equivalent of winmodems), and in particular information about how Lucent AMR modems are definitely not supported in Linux.
The installation should run very smoothly. The only issue is networking (again). You will need to download the drivers that are available from IBM. The trick here is working out it is the same networking setup as the T23. IBM has info and drivers for the T23, but has absolutely nothing (at the time of writing) for the X22.
IBM calls it the "IBM High Rate Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Combo card". You can download the drivers here. I think in the last day they've added something saying this works with the X22. Installation and setup is simple.
mount -o unhide /mnt/cdrom
This one really stumped me for a while!
The Boot Magic program works like a treat. Easy to setup. Another good trick is to just add the IBM Service partition to the boot options, although hopefully you'll never have to run it again.
You can post comments or suggestions for others below. Sorry if I can't answer your emails for help, I'm now really far behind on project work after this setup interlude (grin).