My laptop is working!
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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 :)