# gentoo on thinkpad t420?

## necron

has anyone had any luck running gentoo on a thinkpad t420?

I'd like to run gentoo on one of those things, but I've had issues with hardware in the past.  a few of you may remember me half assedly trying to solve an issue with my wireless card...

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## tomk

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Kernel & Hardware as it's not about Gentoo itself.

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## tianqingfei

You need to download xxx.ucode from internet and put it to the folder /lib/firmware

The detail ucode file name could get from dmesg info. 

Note:

#dmesg > bootinfo

search bootinfo wla, you will see an error line with the ucode file name.

If the /lib/firmware did not exist, just create it.

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## DirtyHairy

I got a new T420 a couple of months ago and am highly pleased with gentoo on it. It is a core-i7 sandybridge machine using the integrated HD graphics. Installation went like a charm and, using the a recent kernel with the current (possibly ~amd64) xf86-video-intel and mesa version, graphics is smooth, fast and stable. The other hardware in the machine works flawlessly with linux as well, including webcam, sd reader and UMTS modem (haven't checked the fingerprint sensor though). Suspend is also working fine, and powersaving works reasonably: I get about 4.5-5 hours on the standard battery (working on the machine that is). I don't have any problems with wifi either.

The only rough edges which I have encountered were:

- Very rare occasional freezes: have been gone since kernel 3.0

- Some time ago, suspend would fail if wifi was activated (killswitch off) and the interface down (this happens e.g. when you turn it off using nm-applet). This might well be resolved now, but I didn't recheck.

- Occasional resume failures when suspending directly from the desktop. Doesn't happen when suspending from another VT, so I wrote a small PM hook to switch to a VT before suspending and back to X upon resume which fixed the issue. This might also be resolved on more recent kernel versions.

- Since kernel 3.0, a power saving feature has been disabled in i915 by default. I use the kernel command line parameter "i915.i915_enable_rc6=1" to get it back.

- My harddrive has does aggressive powersaving by default, resulting in frequent (1-3 times per minute) head park cycles. "hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" disables this "feature" --- I use /etc/conf.d/hdparm to activate it on boot and PM hook to apply it after every resume. 

If you want to use hdaps, you'll have to use the hdaps driver from tp_smapi. Unfortunately, the current version does not recognize the T420, so you have to patch it. I have posted the necessary patch in another thread (I can repost it if necessary).

For the record, my lspci is

```
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 0104 (rev 09)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 0126 (rev 09)

00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point HECI Controller #1 (rev 04)

00:16.3 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point KT Controller (rev 04)

00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Device 1502 (rev 04)

00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cougar Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b4)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b4)

00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b4)

00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev b4)

00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 1c4f (rev 04)

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04)

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cougar Point SMBus Controller (rev 04)

03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 6000 Series (rev 35)

0d:00.0 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e823 (rev 05)
```

P.S.: @tianqingfei: Installing net-wireless/iwl6000-ucode does the trick as well  :Wink: 

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