# Multiple IBM ThinkPad T43 issues [Partially Solved]

## nhaggin

Greetings, all.

Yesterday I took delivery of my sexy new ThinkPad T43, and after work I was able to start installing Gentoo on it. In the process I've run across three interesting problems:

1. The graphics card (Radeon Mobility X300) is causing the common problem of X blanking on startup and not showing the desktop. My machine has 1 GB of RAM; after reading several threads on the forum, I told Linux to use ~830 MB, and lo and behold, X starts properly. It's a nasty kluge. I'll be watching to see if there are any new developments on that score.

2. The machine has a Broadcom BCM5751M gigabit Ethernet chip and an Intel 2915 802.11a/b/g card. If I use the tg3 module for the Broadcom, and load both modules in any order, it seems that they fight to see who gets to be called eth0. The Broadcom wins and the Intel can't be seen unless I remove both modules and then reinsert the Intel. However, the "official" Broadcom driver has excellent manners and doesn't mind being called eth1. Has anyone else experienced this behavior with the tg3 module?

3. Like most IBM laptops, mine has a sound card that can be driven by the snd-intel8x0 ALSA module. It builds fine and loads without errors; I can manipulate the mixer using any number of tools, and I can periodically see (in the logs) it making time measurements and resetting its clock rate. But no matter what I do, I can't get it to emit any sound, through speakers or headphones, using aplay, alsaplayer, or any other audio file player. The card works fine under Windows XP.

After reconfiguring with alsaconf, the relevant lines of /etc/modules.d/alsa are:

```
alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss

alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss

alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss

alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0

alias sound-slot-0 snd-intel8x0

```

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## nhaggin

Hmm...after grovelling through the output of dmesg, it seems my initial guess about the network card problem was wrong; dmesg shows that I'm experiencing this problem: http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/#issues

So that leaves the sound card as something I'm mystified about.

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## didl

 *nhaggin wrote:*   

> 
> 
> 3. Like most IBM laptops, mine has a sound card that can be driven by the snd-intel8x0 ALSA module. It builds fine and loads without errors; I can manipulate the mixer using any number of tools, and I can periodically see (in the logs) it making time measurements and resetting its clock rate. But no matter what I do, I can't get it to emit any sound, through speakers or headphones, using aplay, alsaplayer, or any other audio file player. The card works fine under Windows XP.
> 
> 

 

You probably checked this already, but did you make sure to un-mute

in alsamixer?

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## nhaggin

Yup. Unmuting is the first thing I did.

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## tranquilcool

try compiling the sound drivers as modules or into the kernel. i had some alsa probs with kernels 2.6.12

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## nhaggin

They're currently compiled as modules; I'll build them into the kernel (although the docs do advise against that) and see what happens.

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## nhaggin

No joy compiling them into the kernel, either. This is exceedingly bizarre.

Has anyone heard of unusual conflicts between audio utilities? I had installed JACK and set the "jack" USE flag; I have since uninstalled it.

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## nhaggin

Sound is working. Google turned up this thread on another forum:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/t336380.html

Several posts down it is suggested that both the Headphone Jack Sense and Line Jack Sense controls should be muted in order for any sound to be produced; after I did that, it worked.

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## Voltago

Hi nhaggin!

Could you get bluetooth working? How's the ACPI support? I won't install linux on my T43 until in two weeks or so, but I'd like to know what I have to expect...  :Wink: 

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## nhaggin

ACPI seems to be working properly so far. The screaming fan problem mentioned at the ThinkWiki is not occurring on mine, but I load the speedstep_centrino module, run cpufreqd, and set the DynamicClocks option in xorg.conf for the fglrx driver. I have not yet tried suspend/resume. I also load the ibm_acpi module for the various Fn-combinations.

The model I got (2687-DDU) doesn't have integrated Bluetooth.

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## Voltago

Thanks for your info, nhaggin.

Just for the record: After getting over the initial hurdle of activating the bluetooth device (broadcom) via Fn+F5 - I had to call IBM support to work this one out  :Embarassed:  - bluetooth worked well enough with my SuSE livecd, so setting it up in my future Gentoo installation shouldn't be a problem.

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