Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad R52

Canonical test laptop picked up by PaulSladen on 2005-08-10 from the office in London. Note there is also a R52 model with ATI Radeon Graphics.

Details

• Model: 1858-69G
• Serial: L3-LY704
• Manufacture: 05/07 (2005 July?)

Toys

eg. The things that are more likely to not be working!

• Bluetooth (USB)
• S-Video out

• ExpressCard Type-II 54mm

• Firewire
• Accelerometer ("Hard Drive Active Protection System")

• No Fingerprint scanner on this one...

• IRDA FIR/SIR (0x2f8 /dev/ttyS1 port)
• TPM Trusted Computing chip
• Soft-Modem

• Limited success with LaptopTestingTeam/ThinkpadR52/Multihead and Xinerama foo.

Hardware Spec

Comments

Press-to-select is *not* enabled by default. Turning off the middle button+movement IBM specific scrolling action allows middle button+scroll to work normally as expected and makes Google Maps much more usable. UltraNav is a Synaptics, but none of the fancy stuff is enabled in Windows. Google Maps makes time disappear mysteriously.

Magic Key Combinations

LiveCD experience

Hoary LiveCD failed (corrupt CD).

Hoary LiveCD second attempt, fine, wireless working (associated at 54Mb automatically, but didn't DHCP). Video detected (i915), DRI acceleration, correct resolution. Battery Status working, CD working.

Windows

On first boot Windows, partition is converted from FAT32 to NTFS and OEM installer second-stage run. Questions asked:

• Location, Language, Keyboard (single screen)
• License Agreements (x2)
• Machine Name and Description ("paperweight", "Canonical Freebie")
• Administrator Password (x2)
• Additional users

Tested with:

• Firefox
• Putty
• Google Earth!

Applet Widgetry:

• 12 task-bar icons
  • Wireless Network Connection [Windows]
  • Keep your computer up to date
  • Norton Antivirus Auto-Protect enabled
  • IBM Access Connections [IBM]
  • Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection [IBM]
  • Access IBM Message Center
  • Bluetooth on $hostname
  • Windows Messenger - Not Signed in
  • Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for Mobile
  • Local Area Connection (unplugged) [GigE]
  • Local Area Connection 2 (unplugged) [Bluetooth]
  • No shock detected; Hard drive running [IBM]
  • Volume (muted)
  • Safely Remove Hardware
• Large IBM task-bar Battery/AC applet

GPU Propeties

Intel widget provides:

• Colours (True Colour, High Colour)
• Screen Area (1024x768, 800x600)
• Refresh Rate (60Hz)
• Center Desktop / Full Screen (No Border) / Maintain Aspect Ratio
• Intel Zoom Utility (follows-mouse magnifier)
• Gamma settings (lots)
• Hot Keys: Ctrl+Alt+

• Rotation Select (Enable, Normal, 90^{, 180}, 270^)

• OpenGL (Async flip, Triple buffer, et al...)
• Information (lots of driver-versions...)

Bluetooth

Clicking takes you to "My Bluetooth Places", this includes a side-bar links to:

• Bluetooth Setup Wizard
• View My Bluetooth Services
• Search for devices in range
• View or Modify configuration
  • Device Name

  • Type (Desktop||Laptop)

The device is USB and is 'physically' 'unplugged' by using the menu reached from Fn-F5.

Intel Wireless Widget

A very useful list including MAC address, speed, assocation and:

• Find WLAN

IBM Message Center

Random E.T. Home Phone notifier. Off by default, has various channels including New Products and Driver Updates.

IBM Active Protection System Properties

• Enable Active Protection System (APS)
• Shock detection sensitivity (Low/Medium/High)
• Adaptively ignore frequent repetitive shocks such as those experienced when in a train or automobile.
• Allow me to manually suspend the Active Protection System.
• Suspend for 30sec, 1min, 2min, 3min
• Suspend NOW
• When hard drive is stopped, prompt me to manually suspend the APS.
• Show APS icon in system tray.
• Allows only users with Administrator privileges to modify settings for the APS.
• Real-time Status 3D widget
  • HDD status (Okay, Paused, Vibrations, Suspended)
  • Pitch
  • Roll
  • Click to open/close lid
  • Model recalibrations zero-position after 2 seconds
• About information
• User Interface language selection

On-Screen Display

The following actions produce super-imposed on-screen display output in bright green:

On Windows, the hardware mute is reflected into the internal mixer's mute option and vice-versa meaning that the end user only has to worry about a single mute option (which has a visible dialogue) rather than two nested layers which they only have a 1-in-4 chance of getting past. However, if the hardware volume is at zero then the user will still hear no sound.

Other People

• http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/thinkpad/tpr52/

Linux-tested.com results with RHEL-4.0:

• http://www.linux-tested.com/results/ibm_thinkpad_r52_1849-4qu.html (Radeon graphics)

• http://www.linux-tested.com/results/ibm_thinkpad_r52_1861-5eu.html (Intel graphics)

• http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-48NT8D.html (IBM Certification Page)

Hoary installation

Why do we have Timezone UK/London and UK/Belfast. I liked the wording under Windows of Please select the location closest to you (rather than what is your location). This leaves people unworried if they cannot find an exact match.

NTFS Resizer threatens to write to the disk before you have even made any changes to the size of a partition. This is confusing and scary (it only needs asking *if* a change has been made).

Wifi "just" worked. (IPW2200).

Update Notifier works great.

Gnome-terminal: change colour-scheme to be gray-on-white. Can this be made default, currently the icon suggests it should be gray-on-white, but turns out to be white-on-black.

Firefox: do lusers use the Bookmarks bar? I've always wastes screen-space and could be hidden by default.

As a nipple user, I'm getting annoyed at brushing my thumbs on the TrackPad, how can I disable it in a nice graphical way?

Very impressed to see Synaptics virtual-scroll working automatically. Discovered two-fingers is middle-button paste, three-fingers is right-click. Can't seem to do any dragging just with the pad.

Rescue + Recovery partition

The IBM Rescue + Recovery partition shows up in Grub as 'Win NT/2000' but now crashes later during the boot process if it is selected (the following text appears on a tasteful blue background). Bug #13390

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Session Manager Initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a
 status of 0xc000003a (0x00000000 0x00000000).
The system has been shut down.

Disabling the host protected area hasn't helped.

Hoary Hibernate

System -> Logout -> Hibernate

• Spent a long time in blackness and then powered off. Failed to resume; with message "resume version mismatch", this could have been because of playing with the BIOS settings in between (but not changing any).
• Second time, Hibernate worked perfectly and restored perfected (just looks ugly on the way back).
• Third time, Hibernate proceeded but complained about failure to load ipw2200 firmware, error -2.
• Fourth time, still no ipw2200 firmware

ipw2200: 2200/2915 0.19
ipw2200: ipw-2.2-bss.fw load failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: 0xFFFFFFFE
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: prove of 0000:04:02.0 failed with error -5

Also managed to get the following, which doesn't seem to have affected anything:

ata2: dev 0: ATAPI check failed
ata2: PIO error, drv_stat 0x7f
ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0x177
sr0: Hmm, seems the drive doesn't support multisession CD's
ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0x177 (repeated 3 times)
ata2: command 0xa0 timeout, stat 0x0 host_stat 0x21