Xubuntu on my ThinkPad 760XL

I have this old ThinkPad that's been kicking around for several years now. It was my primary box for quite a while, but it eventually became too slow for the PHP development I was doing on it. Every once in a while, I decide to install a new flavor of Linux (or BSD) on it, just for kicks. I've had RedHat, FreeBSD and Debian running on it. Last night I decided to give Xubuntu a go. I downloaded the alternative CD and installed it (which took several hours.. it's a Pentium 166).

When the box came up, the first thing I noticed was that the video card didn't work properly with the framebuffer splash screen. So, I disabled that in grub by editing the boot process. The next thing I discovered was that the IDE driver for my drive (ide-generic) wasn't coming up automagically, so I'd get a message stating that the root filesystem couldn't be found.

To boot initially:

1. At boot, press Esc to get into the grub menu.
2. Press 'e' on the recovery option.
3. Press 'e' on the kernel line, and add "acpi=off" to the line.
4. Press 'b' to boot.
5. Wait for the BusyBox prompt to come up.
6. Run modprobe ide-generic
7. Exit out of the shell
   

To make the grub changes permanent:

1. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst
2. Edit the kopt line and add "acpi=off pci=biosirq" to the end of it (don't uncomment it).
3. Edit the defoptions line and remove "quiet splash".
4. Run update-grub
5. Verify your changes

To fix the ide-generic problem:

1. Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
2. Add "ide-generic" to the end of the file.
3. Run update-initramfs -u

After that, I rebooted my machine. Those problems I had before didn't come up again. However, X wouldn't start. gdm appeared to be starting and failing.

I did the following in an effort to fix X (you may need to boot into recovery mode again):

1. Log in, and sudo to root (sudo -s).
2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
3. Find the Screen section, and set the DefaultDepth to 8 (it was set to 24 on my box).
4. Make sure that your resolution is set to 800x600.
5. Save and exit
6. Restart gdm via /etc/init.d/gdm restart

There's still a problem with gdm that I haven't quite resolved yet. I'll save that for another post, though.

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I went through some additional cleanup, in an effort to reduce my overhead.

Remove unneeded packages:

• apt-get remove --purge network-manager avahi-autoipd dhcdbd
  (I edited /etc/networking/interfaces and set eth0 to dhcp by hand, so that I wouldn't have to deal with the avahi overhead.)
  
• apt-get remove --purge powernowd
• apt-get remove --purge apparmor
• apt-get remove --purge fuse-utils libfuse2
  

Remove unneeded modules:

• edit /etc/modules and comment out "lp" (unless you have a printer attached)
• edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-local and add "blacklist ipv6"

Clean up cached packages:

• apt-get clean

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Notes on kernel boot prompt: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO.html