Below are some bits of information I found helpful getting Slackware configured on this model.

Slackware 12.0 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T61

Intended Audience:
This document is intended for users already familiar with the Slackware way of life. It assumes a general knowledge of things like compiling from source, recompiling the kernel, loading modules, and firmware. So while some steps may make note of how to do these tasks, it is assumed the reader knows enough to accomplish these tasks on steps that are not explicitly detailed in such a way.

Wireless

Ok, to get wireless working, we first have to figure out what model we have. To do this, we'll run the lspci command.

My card was detected as:
So to get it running, I need the following packages:
Note: I had to use the version 1 firmware, which is in the package iwlwifi-4965-ucode-4.44.15.tgz
The firmware unpacked as iwlwifi-4965.ucode and presented me with an error in dmesg until I renamed it iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode

you can get the package here:
http://intellinuxwireless.org/?n=dow...&f=ucodes_4965

Below is a link to the packages with good installation instructions:
http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwl...=HOWTO-iwlwifi

If you them correctly and loaded the appropriate modules, you should see the following modules loaded when you run lsmod

From here, you should be able to use the iwconfig to set your network parameters and then ifconfig or dhcpcd to request an IP address on wlan0

Video

The video is pretty straight-forward, the hard part was finding the driver for the Nvidia card in my laptop. lspci is not very helpful beyond identifying it as an Nvidia card:

After googling, the actual card is: The following page has some helpful information:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/NVidia_Quadro_NVS_140m

The link to the drivers is at:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_archive.html

Initially, I used the 100.14.09 driver, which worked for 3d accelaration. A bug presented itself though, and I was unable to kill X or use a virtual terminal without the screen going black.

To solve this problem, I upgraded to the 100.14.19 driver, which solved the issue. I should note that the native resolution for this laptop is 1280x800

There is a good thread on solving the virtual terminal issue, should the upgraded driver not work for you. I have not tested these methods, as the driver solved my problem, but it might be worth a try if you have the same issue and it is not solved by the driver:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=120492

Sound

The included alsa packages didn't seem to load the soundcard correctly. I experienced a similar issue on a recent install of an IBM Thinkcentre, and the symptoms I experienced were that the sound would work correctly after loading the snd_hda_intel module, but any change to the volume would disable all sound, forcing a reload of the module and running alsaconf to configure the card, and then an alsactl restore to set the sound settings to the previously loaded settings.

I initially tried removing the packages through pkgtool, then loading updated packages from http://linuxpackages.net

The same problems occurred. So I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the following packages from:
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page

From there, I untarred (that's a word, right?) the packages, configured, compiled, and installed them from source. A better option would be to create a slackware package from the compiled source and install the packages...but I was concerned with immediate usability over long-term upgradeability.

After the packages were installed, I ran rmmod on snd_hda_intel, and tried to reload the module with modprobe, but was greeted with an error. At this point, I ran alsaconf, which configured the soundcard, then ran modprobe snd_hda_intel again without the error. I then ran alsactl restore to set the sound values to their previous settings, and was able to adjust the sound in both applications and alsamixer without issue.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth was fun to get working. It pretty much worked out of the box, I just had to learn the functionality of connecting to a bluetooth device. I use my bluetooth to connect to my phone's wireless internet, so for this document, that is the scope of our bluetooth configuration.

First, I made sure the bluetooth module was loaded with lsmod:
When I ran hcitool dev it didn't detect any devices. I discovered this was a result of the bluetooth daemon not running. To start the bluetooth software, I made the rc.bluetooth file in /etc/rc.d/ executable with:
I then ran:
but start would have worked as well.

Running hditool dev again found my bluetooth device as:
To find my phone, I then ran sdptool browse. It found my phone as:

What we're looking for here is the dial-up network gateway. You'll want to note the mac address of your phone, and the channel the network gateway is running on.

At this point, it's a good idea to go ahead and set your computer's default passkey. I did this in two places. First, I changed the passkey value in /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf to reflect the passkey I wanted, and then ran echo "1234" > /etc/bluetooth/passkeys/default to set the passkey as my default. You can set unique passkeys in the passkeys folder to each mac address, but that's a topic for another day.

From here, I ran:

where <mac address> is my mac address and channel is the channel and there are no <> marks.

If you haven't screwed up, this should establish a connection with your phone.

Now...what do we do with this connection? We need to use a PPP program to establish a connection to the internet. I chose kppp because I was so tired of config files at this point that I wanted a nice pretty gui.

I used the following instructions at:
http://litljay.com/howtos/tether/kppp.html

But it is worth noting that there are additional methods with other programs listed at:
http://litljay.com/howtos/tether/

The instructions above are for connecting to an ATT/Cingular network, so some settings may have to be changed for alternate networks.

ACPI

Because it's a laptop, we will want the acpi and ibm_acpi modules to take advantage of all of the nifty features. I initially compiled my kernel to include the ibm_acpi in the kernel rather than as a module, but I later recompiled as a module in an attempt to get fan support working. It didn't work, but I left it as a module rather than recompile again. Make sure APM is not compiled as either a module or directly in the kernel. ACPI is superior from what I've read, and the two packages will conflict with each other. To load these modules, run:

There are plenty of acpi tools and dockapps that will monitor your system, but a good command line program that displays some very detailed output is acpitool available through http://linuxpackages.net An example of the output is as follows:

Modules

If everything went as planned, you will need to load a few modules on startup to avoid unnecessary headaches of having to load them each time you reboot. To do this, we'll use the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file and add the following lines:

I hope this was helpful. Any questions can be mailed to Chris LeClaire at jimbobjenkins__at___gmail.com