Linux RedHat 9 installed dual boot with Windows XP on an IBM Thinkpad X23.

November 2004: This page out of date: Go to: linux_fedora_core3_x23.html

12 June 2003: I've installed RedHat Linux 9 on my IBM Thinkpad X23. I am a happy guy. You can be happy too.

Updates:

• Original Post: June 2002: RedHat 7.3 on X23. See original page for more details.
• Original Post: June 12, 2003: Revised webpage: RedHat 9. Includes details of wireless LAN.
• Got IrDA working and Jpilot to sync my Palm Pilot in Linux.

Disclaimer: The following represents what I think I should have done. The route I actually took involved several mis-steps. I'm not Linux expert, just someone who uses Linux all of the time to get real work done. I'm sure there are better ways to do this than I have shown here. No promises. Your mileage may vary.

• The IBM X23 has been my companion for almost two years. This is an extremely versitile and effective machine for getting real work done. I highly recommend this machine. Durable, lightweight, long battery life. Very productive. (Update March 29, 2004 -- see note about reliability below)

• Generic RedHat Linux installation stuff. See See original page.

• If you only want single-boot (Linux RedHat 9 only) on the Thinkpad X23: Almost all of the little hassles I have encountered are related to the desire to have dual boot with both Windows XP and Linux -- two operating systems that do not play very well together. If you just want only single boot RedHat 9 on you Thinkpad X23, and you want to kiss Windows XP goodby forever, the steps are much simpler. If you want to do this you are probably already a pretty hard-core Linux type and so the following one-sentence verbal description will suffice: Boot the RH installation disk, run fdisk, delete XP NTFS and Recovery partitions, make your own Linux partitions and install or -- if you are a partition weeny like me -- stop the installation of Linux at point after you have deleted all partitions, reboot your Linux install CD, select graphical install, default partitions, install, select generic laptop display, note that X works out of the box, and , ta-da, you are all done except for putterting around with your odd devices like the IR port, your wireless LAN, your modem or or maybe (heaven help you) an UltraPort web cam. Phwew!

  For the rest of you who want to put Linux RedHat on your fancy new IBM Thinkpad X23 while retaining the ability to boot and run Windows XP, Please read on.

• Why even mess with Windows XP? As a physicist doing teaching and research, I spend 90 percent of my time working in Linux. Unix is the first "real" operating system I ever used, and I've been doing almost all of my useful work on a Unix box of some flavor since 1984. But with annoying frequency I still get stuff from colleagues, administrators, and funding agencies that require Microsoft Windows on a PC just to look at. And while current Linux tools provide a certain level of being able to look at MSWin stuff while running Linux (i.e. Win4Lin is a cute product lets me see about 90 percent of all MS Word documents I get in the mail using my old Win98 software inside of Linux). Still, on occasion, I need to boot Windows native to see in bug-free detail someone's complicated latest-version PowerPoint display with all of the bells and whistles. So there is no way out -- especially since on occasion I need to edit or even create such documents. And besides, my wife likes to run Eudora and Quicken when we travel together. And finally, when I travel I can invoke my ATT ISP seamlessly in Windows-land using the preloaded access numbers and auto-configuring software. I will wait for a rainy day later to sort out how to kick in the modem under Linux.

  So dual boot it is. And since XP comes with the box it seems alot simpler to stick with XP than to load an old Windows 98 (which would probably work but I'd have to track down and install all of the new drivers) or worse yet shell out new dollars for Bill Gates to buy Windows ME. The drawback, of course, is that XP -- being a derivative of Windows NT and 2000 -- does not get along with Linux as well as Win95/98/ME does. In the latter case, you can automatically mount your "C:" drive by adding a appropriate line to your fstab. However, with the kernel that ships with RH 9 you cannot "simply" mount the Windows XP NTFS file system partition in Linux, and -- apparently -- you cannot or should not simply install LILO over the Master Boot Record lest you risk getting it entangled with XP's overwhelming desire to keep it's mitts on the boot process. And doing this this may disconnect you from easy access to the XP recovery partition which you will need if your XP system gets corrupted.

  So, Linux and Windows XP are like two unruly siblings sitting in the back of your car and you need to set the rules down carefully to ensure they do no damage to each other. But it can happen so carry on -- with care.

• Hardware Details of the IBM Thinkpad X23: I got this delivered straight from IBM Direct:
  • Windows XP,
  • 800 Mhz Pentium iii,
  • 128 meg memory originally. Boosted this by 512 meg -- RAM is very inexpensive direct from IBM. This has been most useful for running memory-hungry "Open Office" Impress.
  • 30 Gbyte internal drive (big is good!),
  • Built-in wireless (this is great for home and trips!)
  • Ethernet and modem are built-in.
  • IBM Ultrabase X2 with a CD-RW/DVD put in the bay.
  • An extra battery (two are plenty for coast-to-coast air flight).
  • AC car/airplane power adaptor. I can plug in many places now.
  The Ultrabase also comes with a handy floppy drive and parallel and serial ports. Very nice. When I travel light, I leave the Utrabase at home and at 3.5 pounds, the Thinkpad laptop proper is both light and strong with the titanium alloy cover. This is good because this laptop is not so cheap and I want to keep this thing for a good while -- I physically killed my previous unnamed "bargain" laptop before it could achieve technological obsolescence. First the screen got scrozzled, then the "N" key popped off, then the floppy failed, and finally the display cover cracked at the hinges. After over a year of similar abuse no obvious signs of any wear or tear on the X23.

  An aside -- the XP system on the Thinkpad X23 comes with a whole bunch of little fancy IBM tools and widgets. Some of these, like power management, are kinda cute. If you click on the battery icon it tells you everything there is to know about your battery, like, for example, the date it was first used in your PC and the number of times it has been cycled.

• Factory delivered partitioning: Most important is the fact that the factory-delivered hard drive comes partitioned into two pieces. The first partition is the NTFS file system where XP is pre-installed. The second partition is the FAT32 IBM "recovery" partition which, in case you inadvertantly trash your XP partition, you can boot the recovery partition and it will automatically re-format the main partition and reinstall XP from scratch including any pre-bundled stuff that came with your PC. I had the misfortune of having to do this and the re-install takes about 90 minutes and it is both illuminating and scary to watch the XP recovery process go by -- you can learn alot about how very strange Microsoft is by watching the scheme by which the XP disk is recovered. Anyway, there was no XP recovery CD or anything like this shipped with the laptop from IBM -- gulp! If you plan to dual-boot with XP and Linux, as I did, one of the first steps you want to take is to invoke the recovery partition (F11 key) in the IBM boot manager and make your own recovery boot floppy. This way, in case you somehow screw up and trash the XP partition and the master boot sector on your hard drive, you can still use your recovery floppy to reinstalled Windows XP from the recovery partition -- assuming that you have not trashed this as well. I am a strong advocate of making recovery and boot disks whenever you can since they can save you if you make a mis-step and I certainly made my share of these. I know, we are all supposed to be moving to a brave new world with no floppies. Call me old fashioned.

• Get Partition Magic So here's what I did: I bought a copy of Partion Magic Version 8 from Power Quest Software. You can get this in minutes online with a credit card, $65. This latest version of PM includes Boot Magic, it recognizes the ext3 file system, and it properly handles access to "hidden partitions" with XP. I realize that shelling how dollars for this product will be a very bothersome option when in principle this can be done by hand. Perhaps I am just thick but it seems every time I try to mess with partitions "manually" with fdisk or even disk druid I somehow mess things up and need to start from scratch. With Partition Magic it is (mostly) a breeze. Not too bad for $65.

• Use partition magic to set up your non-Linux partitions: Here is what I did with Parition Magic. Note, I would strongly recommend that you do these steps one at a time. That is, you set up a single change and then you ask Partition Magic to invoke the change. In principle you can ask Partion Magic to set up and invoke all of these things in one throw, but if something gets scrozzled it might not be so clear where you are. Better to go one step at a time. Some of these steps Partition Magic will ask for a reboot.
  • First, I reduced the size of the XP partition from about 27 Gig to about 4.5 gig. WARNING. There is a "gotcha" here. If you use the "resize" wizard option on Partition Magic and you ask to reduce the size of the XP partitionm, it also sets up to move the Recovery partition from the end of the disk down to next to the smaller XP partition. I am pretty sure that you do not want to do this. Do not move/resize or otherwise touch the XP recovery partition. I think if you do, this would be a Bad Thing since I am guessing that neither your boot handler nor your recovery floppy will be able to find the partition if you mess up. You simply want to resize the NTFS XP partition without moving the other partition so that the unused space appears between them on the disk. Make sure that you only have this one action -- resize -- before you commit Partition Magic to execute the change. This will force a reboot.

  • Second, I used Partition Magic to create a new FAT partition just beyond the now smaller NTFS partition. You need this if you are going to use a boot handler like Boot Magic which comes for free with Partition Magic. The size of the FAT partition can be quite small -- I chose 900 meg but you can probably get away with much less. However, you might want a partition this large if you use it as a "shared space" between Linux and XP.

  • Third, Check it all out again. When you are done you will have three partitions and a large region of unused space on your disk. At this point it it worth rebooting XP, running Partition Magic one more time just to make sure that the partition look okay after a reboot, and then reboot yet one more time, and use F11 to make yet another up-to-date recovery boot disk.

• Install Redhat Linux 9 (finally!) This is easy as pie. Reboot, hit F12 and boot from CD rom the first of three Linux 9 install CD's (yes I shelled out dollars to RedHat for the company disks. Someone somewhere has got to pay for all this stuff.)

  The Really Good News: Redhat 9 installs on your Thinkpad X23 like a charm. I chose the graphical Laptop configuration with automatic partitioning option and of course it set up the Linux partitions in the unused space and left the NTFS, FAT, and recovery partitions alone. Installation is extremely straightforward and you just chose defaults for everything except the instalation of the boot record. If you want to keep the IBM boot handler (probably a good thing) and you want to make use of Boot Magic to handle your dual boot, then you need to avoid having Linux installing GRUB or Lilo into the MBS --- at least that is how it seems to me. I got a little scared reading the GRUB documentation -- which as far as I can tell is set up so that an expert can reboot your toaster oven, given the proper command line arguments and kernel support -- so I stuck with the old friend Lilo. You want to boot Linux only from lilo and you want put this on the Linux root partition and NOT the master boot record (MBR). Check the appropriate boxes in the dialog window.

  After this, you just still the CD's in, one, two, three, and in less than an hour your Linux installation is done. When you get to the end and it is time to deal with X windows, chose the highest resolution Generic Laptop display -- NOT the one that the package picks for you. Once you pick the generic display the installer correctly tweaks this to match your laptop display and low and behold X works right out of the box. I run KDE and it appears to run completely bug-free. This is a great improvement from previous versions with respect to Thinkpads. Don't forget to make a Linux Boot floppy. You will need it if you cannot otherwise get the dual booting stuff working later.

• Trackpoint -- One possibly little gotcha -- depending on exactly what you are doing, you might find that the little TrackPoint nub comes up in a sort of "hyper" state where the slitest touch sends the mouse skittering into the corner. I fixed this by disabling the trackpoint in BIOS, rebooting, then rebooting again, re-enabling the trackpoint, and then using PS2 mouse options when blue-screened Kudzu autmatically kicked in to configure my "new" device. Honestly, I do not remember exactly what I did in Kudzu but I selected reasonable choices here and the trackpoint works fine now -- whether or not I also have my USB mouse plugged in.

• Reboot back to XP and check things out: It's time to set up your dual boot and since you got Boot Magic for free when you bought Partition Magic why not use it? Warning: do not try to use Boot Magic until you get to the right place as indicated below. I know from personal experience that if you invoke Boot Magic before you are certain that your partitions and operating systems are in their final form, things can get completely messed up. So when you are done with Linux instalation, reboot. Then I would follow the following what I think this is the safest possible sequence of steps:
  • First, reboot, and you will go back to XP. Here, first, immediately invoke Partition Magic. If something got scrozzled on your parition table when Linux installed, Partition Magic will fix it automatically for you. This happened to me once or twice -- I do not know why. If this happens, reboot again and double check a second time with Partition Magic

  • Second Reboot again, invoke F11 and make a Third Recovery Boot disk for XP. This is last and best recovery boot disk. Throw the other two that you made earlier away.

  • Third Reboot yet again and invoke Partition Magic. Look at the FAT partition. You should do two things (1) reformat it as a FAT file system, and (2) if it is hidden, you should make it visible. This is an option under the "advanced" menu item.

  • Fourth Once this is done, reboot yet even again, and go into Partition Magic again to double check that all is well.

  • Important Warning: Now is the time to run the install program for Boot Magic. As I found out the hard way it is important that you not do this before this point since Boot Magic really want everything completely all set and ready to go with your partitions and your operating systems. In particular, if you try to install Boot Magic before you have your FAT partition ready, it just won't work. Also, there is a little problem with a "trap door" on Boot Magic. Once you install it on your visible FAT partition, that partition become hidden again (apparently since it is now bootable) and so you cannot simply modify things if you are unhappy -- you need to reformat the FAT partition and start all over with installing Boot Magic. Also check out the option in the (very long) PDF manual for unhiding partitions in XP. You will want to do this is you want this disk space accessable to both XP and Linux. So go slow.

• Setting up your dual boot with Boot Magic: Okay, you now have XP installed in the first partition. An empty, formatted and visible FAT partition is second. The Third partition is extended and includes all of your newly installed Linux stuff. The forth partition is the recovery partition which has remained unmolested since the start. Partition magic tells you that everything is as above and happy. You have your latest recovery boot disk. You are now all set to set up dual boot:
  • First, Run Boot Magic install. This looks like a setup Install Shield wizard thingy that is supposed to just install Boot Magic but it is much more and running the installation program immediately kicks in the new boot scheme. In other words, you do not first install, then run Boot Magic. Rather, the installer does everything in one step. By the way, you weill get yet another recovery disk. By now you have a stack of these. Note, if you do not have a visible, primary FAT partition on your disk Boot magic will simply give up immediately.

  • Second, when Boot Magic install appears complete you will have popped up a Boot Magic configuration window. Take the time to configure this now since it will be harder later for the annoying reason that your FAT partition will revert back to being hidden once you install Boot Magic for good. (I suspect that there is a way to inhibit this in Boot Magic but I cannot figure it out). You need to decide if you will default boot to Linux or XP. You probably do not want to boot the FAT sector -- what will happen (an infinite boot loop?) You probably want to rename each of the boot options -- especially the last boot option something like XP recovery.

  • Third, Okay, cross your fingers. All goes well and now on your way to Linux, three boot handlers go by -- the IBM one, Boot Magic, and finally lilo. After arriving happily in Linux land, you probably want to reboot to XP, use Partition Magic to verify your partitions one last time. Maybe even make one more recovery boot disk for XP. Yes, I know I am probably paranoid about this.

• Printer stuff. Between CUPS and the Gnome printer GUI it was easy to setup connections to network printers.

• Redhat Network -- This is a subscription service that automatically tells you when you need a new RPM for security or whatever reason and then it downloads and installs them. I count six (!!) kernel upgrades alone since th release of RH9 a few months ago. This little thing is quite worth the money I think. Consider it money in RH employee's tip jars. Something.

• Ethernet works out of the box for DHCP configurations. You can configure this using the KDE network configuration tool. I set things up so that eth0 (Intel Express 10/100) is deactivated on boot and activatable by the user.

• I have not tried the modem.

• Wireless LAN -- this took a while. Apparently there are many flavors of built-in WiFi cards for different makes and models of IBM Thinkpads so one driver does not serve all. For my X23 apparently the WiFi is or looks like an orinoco device. Some or all of these commands need to be invoked (as root) before you actually try to activate the WiFi device:

  /sbin/modprobe orinoco_cs
  /sbin/modprobe orinoco
  /sbin/modprobe hermes
  /sbin/modprobe orinoco_pci
  

  Once this is done, you can use the KDE network Configuration GUI to install a new Wireless device on eth1. Standard default options work fine for me at home. Easy. Once you figure it out.

• Advanced Power Mamagement (APM) came up but I turned it off. I do not understand why so many laptop users really want this to go. There's alot of bandwidth on Linux for Think Pads (ltp) mailing list about troubles with APM, suspend-to-disk, resume from hibernate, etc., etc. For me all of these features are not even worth the trouble. A clean, cold, boot into Linux about two or three times a day (once each morning in the office, once at home in the evening) does not represent a huge waste of time, especially since I can do other things like chaging out of my boots or making a cup of tea whilst booting. If I want to move the laptop off of my desk and into the lab or someone's office, I just fold down the clamshell, leave the power and display on, and carry it. If I am going to be away from my desk for more than an hour, I'll throw the AC adaptor into a bag and carry them both along. If I am walking or driving I take half a minute to turn off my apps and shutdown. The only time I can think of where I have any real worries about power saving is when I travel, and so far there is no situation where two batteries, a 12V DC adapter, and a set of universal AC pass-through adapters haven't given me evertthing I need. Finally, since presentations are critical, the last thing I need is for my laptop to decide to hibernate in the middle of my OpenOffice presentation because it has decided that it should be saving power or haven't hit a key for a while or whatever. So I just turned the whole kit and kaboodle off. Note added March 29, 2004 -- I would not be surprized to learn that my regular reboot and an avoidance of suspend and hibernate functions has constributed substantially to the remarkable level of reliability I have experienced with this system. See Update March 29, 2004 below.v

• I havent tried reading a DVD or writing a CD-R in Linux yet.

• I have a little web cam that sits on the top of the screen. It works very nicely in XP with associated software. I have not tried this under Linux, although there is apparently a driver for it out there somewhere.

Update: June 27, 2003, IR working

I finally got my IR port to go. Simply invoking the gui "Handheld PDA" (gpilot) does work. In fact, while running KDE I never got gpilot to work at all. The process I took to make IR work boil down to these -- examimining the Infrared HOWTO, ignore what appears to be a bunch of information that does not apply, and trying out various things until it works. Warning: I made no attempt at a systematic installation. Getting IR up was about five or six hours of "trial and error" work, mostly done in 20 minute intervals in airport waiting lounges over the past several months. So this hardly counts as a defininitive set of instructions.

Specifically the following things work for me:

• Make sure that the IR port is enabled in bios. That would be IRQ set to 3 and the address set to 0x2f8.
• My /etc/sysconfig/irda file looks like this:

  IRDA=yes
  DEVICE=/dev/ttyS1
  #DONGLE=actisys+
  DISCOVERY=yes
  

• My modules.conf has the following two line:

  # IrDA over a normal serial port, or a serial port compatible IrDA port (SIR)
  alias tty-ldisc-11 irtty
  

• Reboot and make sure that the ircomm1 device exists in /dev. This is the device that you want to specify in your syncing application -- NOT /dev/ttyS1.
• After booting make sure the following line comes out when you type: dmesg | grep irda

  IrDA: Registered device irda0
  

• As root, invoke irdadump. If you are lucky you will see a nice output:

  20:38:01.353724 xid:cmd 7a355d6d > ffffffff S=6 s=0 (14)
  20:38:01.443720 xid:cmd 7a355d6d > ffffffff S=6 s=1 (14)
  20:38:01.533724 xid:cmd 7a355d6d > ffffffff S=6 s=2 (14)
  20:38:01.623728 xid:cmd 7a355d6d > ffffffff S=6 s=3 (14)
  20:38:01.713732 xid:cmd 7a355d6d > ffffffff S=6 s=4 (14)
  20:38:01.803736 xid:cmd 7a355d6d > ffffffff S=6 s=5 (14)
  20:38:01.893741 xid:cmd 7a355d6d > ffffffff S=6 s=* hea1 hint=0400 [ Computer ] (20)
  

• While running irdadump try bringing your palm device over to your IR port. You should see some extra stuff as the palm and your laptalk say hello to each other.
• How to sync? I tried "kpilot" - it worked, sort of. I found that KOrganizer was not so compatible with my Palm IIIxe. Specifically every time I synched each entry was put into multiple catagories. My hands-down favorite syncing and calendar app is jpilot which is terse, simple, functional, and has never failed to sync properly.

Update: August 26, 2003

Everything still works A-okay. A total of 12 kernel updates from RedHat since the initial release of RH9. I stumbled onto the program "gkrellm" which is the most compact and informative graphical system performance monitor I have had the pleasure to use. Meanwhile, I still cannot say enough good things about jpilot for syncing my PDA. This single piece of software has freed me from daily booting XP. Now I boot XP perhaps once a week.

Update: March 21, 2004: Pondering Fedora Core

Update: March 29, 2004: A Word about the reliability of the Thinkpad X23

==========================================================================
Corbin E. Covault, Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University
Mailing Address: 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland OH 44106-7079
Office: Room 207 Rockefeller Physics Bldg.  Phone:     (216)-368-4006
Secy:  Lori Rotar: (216)-368-4257           Fax:       (216)-368-4671
Home Phone: (216)-707-1618                  Mobile:    (216)-496-2077
Lab:   Room 11 A.W. Smith Building          Lab Phone: (216)-368-3632
Email: corbin.covault@cwru.edu              Web: http://hea.cwru.edu
Research: Experimental Physics -- Ground-based High Energy Astrophysics
==========================================================================