IBM Thinkpad X24 and OpenBSD

model: 2660-XX4
Intel Pentium III-M 1.13GHz CPU
384MB/640MB SDRAM SODIMM
30GB HDD
12.1" XGA screen (1024x768)
ATI Radeon Mobility M6MC video chip, 8MB
Intel PRO/100 NIC (fxp(4))
2 USB ports, 1 PCMCIA slot, 1 CompactFlash slot
Crystal Semiconductor CS4299 audio chip
weight: 1.6 kg
dmesg
XF86Config

Summary

Everything works (with some minor exceptions)! Here is why this is a great laptop:

it's very light
it's very small
the keyboard is very comfortable to use and most of the keys are full size
it has a trackpoint
it's very well designed
OpenBSD works great on it

The only downside is that there is no CD/DVD drive (but that's what pxeboot(8) is for; too bad that you can't play DVDs with it ;-).

Pre-Installation Partitioning

OpenBSD users who don't care about preserving MS Windows should disregard this section.

There is an easier solution (than the one in the next paragraph): use System Rescue CD to boot and then run qtparted from the CD. It works very well with NTFS partitions. Qtparted is amazing; it is almost as good as Partition Magic. However, currently, support in OpenBSD for writing files is limited and that's why you should consider using FAT32 for the Windows partition.

After you turn on the laptop for the first time, the recovery procedure will start and will install Windows XP from the hidden FAT32 partition. You will end up with a huge NTFS partition and an OS that you probably do not like. Here is what you can do if you want to install OpenBSD (or Linux) and keep Windows, but can't afford to buy Partition Magic. The first thing you might want to try is ntfsresize. You can download partboot for USB floppy drives (a two-floppy Linux distribution which among other things contains ntfsresize and gnu's parted). The problem I ran into was that even after I defragmented the NTFS partition, ntfsresize was able to shrink the partition only to about 14GB which of course is beyond the first 8GB and usually results in getting a "bad magic" message when you try to boot OpenBSD. The second solution which actually works I found in here. The page is written for an IBM Thinkpad T40 which uses the new HPA (Hidden Protected Area) recovery solution instead of the Partition-based solution found on the IBM Thinkpad X24 (for more information about the two methods, see this PDF. However, the information can be applied to both. In essence, the solution is to not let the recovery scripts convert the huge partition from FAT32 to NTFS. This is simply done by using the above mentioned partboot floppy disks towards the end of the recovery process (after Windows XP has been installed, but before the conversion). After you boot (you can do that during the constant reboots), you can mount the FAT32 partition and rename "c:\windows\system32\convert.exe" to something like "convert.ex_". The scripts might complain, but everything will work out fine and you will be able to resize the FAT32 partition with gnu parted.

Audio

CS4299 is supported but the output is muted (thanks snafu.org). At least the master output and the dac input have to be unmuted:

mixerctl -w outputs.master.mute=off mixerctl -w inputs.dac=off

Video

The card is supported and works without problems. You can either get my XF86Config or you can do XFree86 -configure and then add DefaultDepth and Modes.

APM

Stand-by mode works (apm -S). Suspend mode works (apm -z). Power off works (halt -p). Hibernation does not work. Sometimes the laptop has trouble "waking up" after a long time in suspend mode (it seems to be improving with every new OpenBSD release). Also, sometimes, after a long time in stand-by or suspend mode, I have to do

sh
/etc/netstart

to reinitialize the network settings.

NIC and Modem

The network card is recognized as fxp0 and is working just fine. The modem is a Lucent winmodem and as far as I know does not work.

misc

PCMCIA, USB, and CompactFlash are working. I haven't tried the Infrared port.

$Id: ibmx24.html,v 1.4 2005/01/25 04:11:21 vgs Exp $