Jay's Homepage > > Mandrake on an IBM X31

Mandrake Linux on an IBM Thinkpad x31

Hardware Support

General Install of Mandrake

Before installing I used Partition Magic to resize my WindowsXP partition to 6GB and converted it from NTFS to FAT32 (so that I could write to it from my Linux system, and use the freespace on it as temporary storage space.)

To boot from the Mandrake install CD-Rom in a USB CD-Rom drive, press the blue Access IBM button and select "ATAPI CD-ROM" in the startup options. (some USB drives may make you use the "Removable Media" option instead.)
I suggest you select the "use freespace on disk" option and allow Mandrake to automatically partition your drive. Select packages, and install. Total time is about 50 minutes with the default package selection. If you do a manual selection, be sure to get the following packages as I will be telling you how to configure them later on in this document (and they are useful):

Choose to configure your X system, Mandrake automatically and correctly determines the screen resolution (1024x768) and X-server type (Radeon). For everything else, I just used the default options. Congratulations, you now have a working Linux partition.

Post Install Tweaks

This is a list of tweaks that I performed after the initial install to enable extra features in the hardware such as getting the special IBM keys to give on-screen display information.


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Jay's Homepage > > Mandrake on an IBM X31