Lenovo Thinkpad T420

Introduction

Throughout, this article will assume the following:

• You have installed Gentoo or Funtoo in the past.
  • If you haven't, this article will still serve you well, but please have either the official funtoo, or gentoo install guides open. We move through non-machine-specific bits with little elaboration.
• Have a T420 or similar machine.

Even if you do not have a T420, you may find this guide useful for:

• Nvidia Optimus Cards.
• Power management.
• General setup.

This installation assumes (For now) that the install is starting from an MS-Windows installation. If you are not on Windows, please add your favourite choice of steps, keep the emphasis on ease of understanding.

Getting Started

You'll want to get yourself running off a LiveCD or LiveUSB to start. This guide will assume liveUSB, since some users find them more difficult to prepare, this is usually due to boot flag issues. (Note: Live USB restore drives are nice to have in general! The author keeps one in his college binder.)

Windows

We can use LiLi for this, it provides a nice, simple interface and is fairly reliable: LiLi Download

SysrescueCD

Grab the version that Suites your needs here: Sysrescue Download Next use LiLi (Or whatever you happen to be using) to flash the image or burn your CD. Reboot, change your boot device, and you'll find yourself at a grub menu.

Since the T series are all 64-bit laptops, make sure to boot the 64-bit kernel, as the default is 32-bit.

But Why?: If we pick 32-bit, later on we won't be able to chroot into our Funtoo's 64-bit stage 3.

You should see a fairly verbose boot as sysrescueCD scans for modules it requires and starts up. It is safe to simply accept prompt defaults here, unless they are errors.

When you are greeted by the interactive command prompt, enter 'wizard' as prompted, and accept the default entry in the dialogue. This will give us a functioning XFCE desktop environment.

Partitioning

Partitioning is the only step of this install which provides real risk to data on other operating systems. Be extremely careful if there is something you do not wish to loose. These steps are not foolproof and may result in lost data.

Please be aware that MBR disks only support 4 primary partitions. You can solve this by creating an 'extended' partition and adding logical partitions to it. If you are feeling particularly brave try GPT on your disk.

So lets start: First open up gparted. You should see it on the taskbar if you're using systemrescueCD. It will scan available drives and show you the partition table. Most users will likely find one of the following to their liking:

Pure Funtoo

You'll likely want:

/boot       :: EXT2       :: 100mb-500mb
    ''Note: We choose EXT2 because there is really no good use for a journalled boot partition, but feel free to use EXT4 instead!''
/           :: EXT4       :: 60gb (suggested floor value) - 500+
swap        :: linux-swap :: Your RAM Value (Optional, allows for hibernation)

You may wish for a separate /home, which is perfectly legitimate, or any number of other partitions.

Dual Boot with Windows

If dual booting with Windows, it is advisable to have Windows installed first since it will muck with the MBR and possibly want to create it's own boot partition. You'll likely want:

System Reserved    :: NTFS      :: Whatever windows chooses.
Windows            :: NTFS      :: >100gb (If you plan on doing any serious work on windows)
/boot              :: EXT2      :: 100mb-500mb
Extended Partition -
  /                :: EXT4      :: Whatever is left.
  swap             :: linux-swap:: Your RAM value. (Optional, allows for hibernation)

You may also want a separate /home, etc. These will fit into your extended partition without contributing to MBR's 4 partition limit.

Actually Starting the Install

Up until now everything we've done has just been foreplay. Finally we can mount our partitions and get started on the installation!

Mounting

First, lets mount all of our partitions.

• Make a directory for root. Lets assume /mnt/funtoo

mkdir /mnt/funtoo

• Mount your '/' partition to /mnt/funtoo

mount /dev/sd## /mnt/funtoo

• Make a directory for your boot partition.

mkdir /mnt/funtoo/boot

• Mount your boot partition.

mount /dev/sd## /mnt/funtoo/boot

• Mount anything else you may have made and need. (Not swap)

Checking the Date

Although this may seem super un-important, if you want to avoid lots of spammy warning messages later, checking your date is beneficial.

date

If it needs to be set, you'll want something like:

date 071620002011
#Fri Jul 16 20:00:00 UTC 2011

Fetch a Stage 3

Next we need to fetch a tarball containing a barebones stage. We will download the core-i7 architecture version, if you have a core i5 or i3, don't worry, it's all the same.

cd /mnt/funtoo
wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/funtoo/funtoo-current/x86-64bit/corei7/stage3-current.tar.xz

Next lets unpack with

tar xJpf stage3-current.tar.xz

Seriously, don't forget the 'p' option.

If you run 'ls' now, you should see the /mnt/funtoo is fully populated with folders such as lib, home, and proc.

Chroot'ing

Now we need to change the apparent root of our system to our fledgling Funtoo system.

cd /mnt/funtoo
mount --bind /proc ./proc
mount --bind /dev ./dev
cp /etc/resolv.conf ./etc
env -i HOME=/root TERM=$TERM chroot /mnt/funtoo /bin/bash --login