Installing Red Hat 6.1 on an IBM ThinkPad i1412

My ThinkPad i1412 has the following configuration: Intel Celeron 366 Mhz 4645 MB HD 10X-24X CD-ROM 1.44MB Floppy Drive 96 MB SDRAM (default 32 MB) NeoMagic MagicMedia 256AV display adapter (800 X 600), 2.5MB DRAM 12.1" TFT LCD screen 84 key keyboard ESS Solo 1 audio card Altec Lansing Sound Guide Speakers Lucent Winmodem (Yuk! Oh well....) PCMCIA 2 Type-II or 1 Type III, cardbus, 16-bit or ZV Lithium Ion Battery (3.3 hours claimed) Ports: 1 USB, 1 DB-9 serial, 1 EPP, 1 PS/2, 1 Monitor out, 1 RJ-11, 1 Port Replicator Other:headphone, line-in, mic-in jacks

Install

I got a pretty good install with Red Hat 6.1 out of the box. I don't have a modem yet, so no internet. I will update this info as I add hardware.

I used Red Hat's new GUI installer. I selected the following configuration options:

• Keyboard: Generic 101-key PC, US English w/ISO 9995-3, No variant
• Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse PS/2
• Monitor:IBM 9514 TFT
• X server: SVGA server, 800 X 600, 16-bit color

Partitioning

For my initial partitioning, I left the original C: drive as Win 98*. This was about 2.3 gigs. I hope to milk another gig out of this when I find a partitioning tool. I want to add a partition for CVS archives.

I set up the following partitions in the remaining 2.5 gigs:

This was plenty of space for my install. I basically made a KDE development workstation with lots of libraries, tools, and administrative stuff as well as a generous supply of games and fun stuff.

By the way, there is a downside to running KDE on this machine. KDE doesn't play well with 800 X 600. It really wants a 1024 X 768 or larger screen. However, I recommend KDM. It allows you to boot into KDE, Gnome, or whatever other window managers you have installed.

*You are probably asking yourself why anyone in their right mind would want to keep an abomination like Windows 98. Well, it is actually useful to have around. I needed to patch the OS in my Palm Pilot and didn't have a Windoze machine to put the software on. Hopefully the rest of the world will get a clue and make more stuff available for Linux. </rant>

Easy Sound Setup

After messing around with Alsa drivers, as described below, I discovered that there is an OSS driver for the Solo1 card already in Red Hat 6.1. I just ran sndconfig (after unloading all the other modules I was screwing with.) That's it!

I couldn't make the KDE system sounds work, but I was able to use the KDE Media player to play a WAV file. The CD player still works. MIDI files also work through KDE's Midi player.

New Info: KDE sound can be made to work by creating a symbolic link from /etc/sysconfig/soundcard to /etc/sysconfig/sound. The startkde script is looking for a file called sound. (The soundcard file is created by sndconfig.) Another approach to this is edit the startkde script to look for soundcard.

Alternate Sound Setup

This is how I tried to set up the sound drivers on my first try. With this method I was only able to verify that I could play a CD. The problem was I was testing the sound with KDE's system sounds setup which apparently doesn't work.

First, credit where credit is due, I got the info for setting up sound from the following pages:
Anand Kumar Sankaran's Running Red Hat 6.0 in IBM ThinkPad iSeries 1412
Alsa-sound-mini-HOWTO
Terratec 128iPCI sound card (ESS-Solo-1) (es1938) working in Linux S.u.S.E 6.2 with kernel 2.2.10 and ALSA 0.4.1d

In a nutshell here's what I did:

1. I fetched alsa-driver-0.4.1e.tar.gz, alsa-lib-0.4.1e.tar.gz, alsa-utils-0.4.1.tar.gz from the www.alsa-project.org website.
2. Untarred/Compiled driver with

   ./configure --with-isapnp=yes --with-debug=full
   make
   make install
   				

3. Repeated procedure for lib and utils. Note, drivers must be installed before configuring the libs.
4. Ran "./snddevices" from the driver directory. This created the device entries in /dev.
5. Added these lines to /etc/conf.modules (This info is taken almost verbatim from the Terratec page mentioned above.)

   alias char-major-14 snd
   alias sound snd
   alias midi snd
   
   # Alsa stuff
   alias char-major-116 snd
   alias ljud snd-card-es1938          # to be able to 'modprobe ljud'
   alias snd-minor-oss-0 snd-mixer
   alias snd-minor-oss-3 snd-pcm1-oss
   alias snd-minor-oss-12 snd-pcm1-oss
   options snd snd_major=116 snd_cards_limit=1
   alias snd-card-0 snd-card-es1938
   alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-es1938
   
   # OSS stuff
   alias char-major-14 soundcore
   alias oss snd-pcm1-oss
   alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
   alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm1-oss
   alias sound-service-0-4 snd-pcm1-oss
   alias sound-service-0-5 snd-pcm1-oss
   				

6. Ran depmod -a
7. Ran modprobe snd-card-es1938
8. Ran modprobe snd-pcm1-oss
9. Ran modprobe snd-mixer-oss
10. Ran amixer set PCM 100 unmute

So far I have played a CD. The KDE audio mixer app appears to work. I haven't tested wav or MIDI files. I haven't tried the microphone. I also haven't rebooted yet. The next time I boot it up I may have to fiddle some more. I will try to update this page after I have tested things more thoroughly.