ThinkPad T61 and Fedora

I’m the proud owner of a new Lenovo ThinkPad T61. It has the new 965GM graphics chipset as well as the Intel 4965 a/b/g/n wireless. The T61 is currently only available in widescreen and I have the 14.1″ 1440×900 model. So far I’ve been fairly impressed, but it being a new laptop there are always a few tricks to get it working.

Fedora 7 has the new Intel drivers that drive the 965GM and X seems to work fine. However, it appears as if Gnome doesn’t understand the widescreen resolution. GDM, the graphical boot loader, and Gnome itself seems to only want to work in a 1024×768 window in the upper left corner of the screen. In Gnome, I can re-adjust the panels (except the top panel) and move windows and use the space outside the box but the below image is what things look like per default. You can see that the resolution selection app seems to believe that 1024×768 is as high as we go. Does anyone know a solution to this?

The Intel 4965 wireless does not work out of the box. However, Intel has released drivers as part of the iwlwifi kernel modules. The most recent Fedora 7 kernel (2.6.21-1.3228.fc7) has an older set. It looks like using a newer snapshot of this project and getting the microcode for the wireless card should enable this to work fairly well. This article has some details for getting the iwlwifi code to work on Fedora 7.

5 Responses to “ThinkPad T61 and Fedora”

  1. jeremy Says:

    X should work properly — without the X.log, hard to say what’s confusing it.

  2. Tom Volscho Says:

    I just got the T61 as well.

    Vista is pretty bad, there does not seem to be much to recommend it.

    I just downloaded F7 and was going to give a try at installing it on the T61.

    There is some good info here, in case you did not see it yet:

    http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?p=821804#post821804

  3. Anonymous Says:

    The Solution to your problem is to disable TV out so if you type the command:

    xrandr –output TV –off

    This will solve your problem for now.
    Currently have a bugzilla open for the issue:
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11366

  4. Jack Neely Says:

    The xrandr command does work. Thanks!

  5. Anonymous Says:

    I found this thread on the fedora newsgroups which describes a way to fix this permanently by editing your xorg.conf file.

    http://forums.fedoraforum.org/
    showthread.php?t=159516

    S.

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