I've had a few IBM ThinkPad R40's kicking around my basement for a while now, all having one problem or another. Last night I decided to take the working bits of some to build another working machine which would be destined to run Fedora Core 5.

The project was pretty easy. There was really only one snag. When I moved the internal wireless card from one laptop to the one destined to work and tried to boot up I was greeted by an exciting error:

1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in - Power off and remove the miniPCI network card.

Whoa, wait a minute, did you just say that this card that came from you and went into a slot you built in is unauthorized? Go go gadget google! And that's when I found this. Matthew Garrett has provided some hacks which disable the wireless check and allowed the machine to boot. I used the linux hack and it worked like a charm.

So now I've got a shiny IBM ThinkPad R40 up and running with internal wireless and all. Next up, learning to swap LCDs.

Marc- Presuming those leftover R40s are the same I played with long ago, the LCD swap is fairly easy, although it's even easier to just make sure the backlight ribbon connecter is plugged in correctly -- they often weren't.

Only thing to be cautious of is making sure the touchpad ribbon gets seated correctly... it's tricky to reconnect.

a