Gentoo_linux

After a lot of work my shiny new IBM R40e is up and running with almost working ACPI, internal network adapter and a 3Com 54g wireless PCMCIA card, all on Gentoo Linux.

A Mini HOWTO:

• Get an old PCMCIA card for the installation as the internal network adapter is not supported by the Live-CD
• I choose the Gentoo Stable kernel which is working great
• Do not enable PCMCIA in the kernel, emerge the pcmcia-cs package instead for continued setting up of the system.
• Get the network card driver from Broadcom, the card is a BCM-5700. Compile it and put it in the /lib/modules/*kernel-version*/kernel/driver/net/ folder. Run update-modules and modprobe bcm-5700 Add it to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.4 if needed
• Get the ISL driver for the 3Com card. Follow the instructions closely, but patch the gs-sources kernel instead. I removed the pcmcia-cs package before compiling the kernel as it provides its own cardbus implementation. Supposedly only the card drivers can be compiled, but I didn’t try that.
• Emerge the wireless-tools package. iwconfig is your friend.
• ACPI is somewhat unstable, the battery information comes and goes in a undetermistic way.
• The modem is supported by the HSF driver but that in turn does not support preemptible kernels. Choose whatever you want

I’ll probably update this as I learn more. This is posted over wireless by the way :)

I got myself a new laptop the other day, a IBM T40e. It has a pretty good price performance with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4M. While researching the laptop market it occured to me that most resellers still has not understoiod the difference between Centrino, Pentium 4M and Pentium 4. The vendor I choose happily listed the T40e as a P4 even though it in fact is a P4M.

As a Gentoo fanatic I put the Live CD in an booted - no network. The Broadcom 5700 adapter was not supported out of the box, so after trying I few innovative ideas like creating a custom LiveCD, I suddenly realized that I could use my old Xircom card in the PCMCIA bus. Sometime the easy solutions are really hard to find, and sometimes I’m just a dork for not seeing them. This time it was the latter.