Chris’s Domain

It’s too beautiful to resist. and I have to replace my aging G3 iBook, so why not?

Next step, Vista on a Macbook = perfection

Ok, I’m definitely not thinking straight right now as the stress is getting to me, but this morning, I woke up and realised that the new aluminium Macbooks are really really attractive.

I spend half my life loathing Apple products after my last iBook died and couldn’t be repaired. I always find Mac users to be conformists as they purchase the exact same notebook with the same configuration and OS that virtually everyone has due to their popularity. I love to feel that I own a unique device which is part of the reason I never bought into the whole Mac sub-culture. The other thing is obviously I never found the previous iteration of the Macbooks that attractive, but the new E2E display has created a really nice effect like that of HP’s Pavillion without the overglossy finishing.

Wondering if I should get a Macbook, install Vista/Ubuntu and proudly attach the Vista case sticker onto it. It would be an awesome laptop.

I figured this could be useful for anyone trying to set up their X301….

Vista Issue
I was having problems trying to do a clean install of Vista Business x64 on the X301 as the Windows installation disc failed to use the generic AHCI driver and also failed to load the ICH9 driver that I provided. The Vista setup repeatedly ask the user to load a missing CD/DVD driver when the HDD is set to AHCI mode.

DO NOT ATTEMPT A CLEAN INSTALL BEFORE BACKING UP C:\DRIVERS and C:\SWTOOLS to an external storage device.

I solved this by performing the following steps:
1) From original Lenovo image, backup C:\DRIVERS\VISTA64\IMSM\Vista\IaStor.sys
2) In BIOS, under Config, change the HDD mode to Compatiblity.
3) Install Vista from standard DVD.
4) Boot up Vista
5) Replace IaStor.sys from C:\Windows\System32\drivers with the one you’ve backed up earlier.
6) Shutdown PC
7) In BIOS, under Config, change the HDD mode to AHCI.
Boot up Vista

If it doesn’t raise a BSOD, then the switch to AHCI mode is working.

You can then proceed to download and install all drivers from Lenovo’s site. SP1 updates should automatically come through as there should be no further conflicts.

Ubuntu Issues

Ubuntu 8.10
UPDATE: Everything essential works out of the box with the latest 8.10 Beta release. I’d strongly recommend installing this rather than performing all the fixes below.

Ubuntu 8.04
The latest stable release is 8.04 LTS, so this is what I installed. Alternatively, you can either recompile the 2.6.26/27 kernels for OOB support for the Intel 5100/5300 driver support or try out 8.10 which will be final in a month’s time.

The LiveCD will not boot normally and you will get a BusyBox terminal. In order to fix this, hit F6 in the initial screen and enter “irqpoll” as part of the boot arguments to launch Ubuntu from the LiveCD.

The Intel 5100/5300 card is not recognised by default. You must perform the following steps as listed here:

First, you should do an apt-get upgrade to get the latest updated kernel image and modules, then reboot.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11.tar.gz
tar -xzvf iwlwifi*
sudo cp iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11/iwlwifi-5000-1.ucode /lib/firmware/2.6.24-19-generic
wget http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6/2008/09/compat-wireless-old-2008-09-09.tar.bz2
bunzip2 compat-wireless-old-2008-09-09.tar.bz2
tar xf compat-wireless-2.6-old.tar
cd compat-wireless-2.6-old/

Type:

gedit config.mk
 

A file will open. Search for the string CONFIG_IWL4965_HT=y. Directly after that string, on a new line, add this string if it doesn’t exist:

CONFIG_IWL5000=y


Then save and close the file, and finish the installation with:

make
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo make load
 

Steps modified from here.

The only catch here is to download this specific version of compat-wireless as the versions after this broke the 5300 card support again.

Almost everything else works OOB for Ubuntu 8.04, including the webcam and sound. I did not test the fingerprint reader, but it should work as well as the drivers exist for it. Touchpad support sucks as this has the ALPS touchpad and its hopeless in Linux. The Active Protection System does not work in the X300/X301 as the hdaps project has yet to support the newer models.

To optimise battery life, set the power management for the wireless card as follow:
iwconfig wlan0 power on

There are other more sophisticated tweaks such as hard disk timeouts etc that you can play with. Installing powertop may be a good idea too.

After more than a year (1.5 year to be exact), I’ve finally managed to find the time (and enthusiasm) to maintain a blog again. The old boastMachine engine is dead, after being spammed one too many times and I’ve finally settled on Wordpress.

Henceforth, this is the brand new 2008 edition of my story. As the story of my life in the past year is too much and possibly too traumatic to recount, we’ll just ignore it.