On January 25, 2005, I installed Fedora Core 3 on a new IBM ThinkPad T42 (model 2378FVU: 14.1 inch display, 1400x1050 display, 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9600, 40GB hard drive). This page tracks my experiences and notes with Fedora Core 3 specifically.
I have since upgraded through Core 4 and Core 5, and upgraded the hard drive (and performed a fresh install of XP and Core 5 on the new disk).
These pages detail my experiences.
After some minor tweaking, almost everything works, including the display, power management (including variable CPU clock speed, a.k.a. SpeedStep), built-in wired and wireless networking, sound, and advanced touchpad features (tapping with two fingers = middle-button; tapping with three fingers = right-button; moving your finger along the right edge = scroll wheel). The only exceptions:
Details follow.
After repartitioning and some minor tweaks, everything went OK except for the caveats above.
For details, see my Fedora Core 3 page.
I upgraded to FC4 using the DVD, and updated using yum update. Upgrade and update were both seamless.
Not much to say here. I burned the FC4 binaries DVD to a DVD+RW, and booted from the DVD-ROM drive. The upgrade went smoothly, and asked me to reboot. Upon boot, I logged into KDE (no troubles), su'd to root, activated my network, and used yum update to update to the latest RPMs (all 142 of them, as of 25 July 2005 — you don't want to do this on a slow connection). Everything went completely smoothly.
I upgraded to FC5 using the DVD, and updated using yum update. The only significant hitch was freeing up disk space; otherwise, the upgrade and update were both seamless.
Again, not much to say. I burned the FC5 binaries DVD to a DVD+RW, and booted from the DVD-ROM drive. The installer kept complaining midway through about insufficient disk space, so I had to free up disk space and restart the installation multiple times, which was pretty annoying. In the end, I needed about 2GB free on my root partition in order to make the installer go through. Once it did, however, the upgrade proceeded without any further intervention on my part.
Once the install was complete, the system booted clean, and I performed yum update, which fetched the usual massive load of post-install RPMs (about 200MB for the first batch, which didn't include any of the office or multimedia software that I'd uninstalled to make disk space).
Note that Core 5 now has pup, a graphical front-end to yum update, but it doesn't give me as much progress info, so I still use yum update most of the time.
Update 26 August 2006: Also note that recent Fedora updates include changes that glitch power management, requiring manual fixes. See the power management section of my Fedora Core 5 upgrade/reinstall notes for details.
I upgraded my hard drive, reinstalled Windows and Fedora, and transferred all my data using an external USB hard drive enclosure. The software installation was pretty much like Core 3.
For details, see my Core 5 hard drive upgrade page.
The best meta-resource for Linux on IBM laptops is the linux-on-laptops.com page for IBM. The rest of these links were found there: