Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Debian Lenny to Squeeze on Thinkpad T42

The good:
  • Faster bootup.
  • Very fast switching between X and a VT.
  • Firefox 3.5 is much faster than 3.0.
  • Most Thinkpad extra keys now work great out of the box.
  • Cool desktop backgrounds.
The bad:
  • X11 looked funny. Turns out no themes were installed. Had to install gnome-themes.
  • Got a bunch of warnings from udev on bootup, coming from z60_xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules, so I purged xserver-xorg-input-wacom.
  • The ACPI hotkey events changed names, so some hooks I had set up in /etc/acpi/events stopped working until I updated the names.
  • EmulateWheel setting in xorg.conf no longer works. xinput works. I installed gpointing-device-settings, which is a very convenient solution.
  • Alt_R keycode is now 108 instead of 113.
The ugly:
  • X wouldn't start. Turns out it was because gdm wasn't installed. Why did gdm get removed during upgrade? Maybe it wanted to replace it with gdm3? But it didn't install gdm3.

1 comment:

  1. Extra notes for clean install:

    Need a /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf with this line or else volume buttons are hardware only so no OSD:

    options thinkpad_acpi hotkey=enable,0xffffff experimental=1

    See also: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524425

    To handl Fn-F7 myself, need to disable gnome xrandr plugin by unchecking it in /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/xrandr/. Then I can hook it up to my video.sh script using a normal keyboard shortcut.

    To swap right mouse with middle mouse, need to check resize_with_right_button in gconf-editor under /apps/metacity/general/.

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