Submitted by “Few computers have more right to the term ‘business machine’ than the ThinkPad laptop series – and not just because the brand was developed by a company named International Business Machines (IBM). Traditionally ThinkPads have been built for speed and durability, but recently GNU/Linux users have discovered that the ThinkPad is built for compatibility as well. The latest in the ThinkPad T series is a landmark in several ways: it’s the first to use a Core Duo processor; the first to be made and sold by Lenovo instead of IBM; and the first to offer official manufacturer support for GNU/Linux.”
I still have an IBM Thinkpad T40p, after three years, its held up better than any laptop I’ve previously owned. I would recommend the T series.
Mandriva 2007 PowerPack Edition: Works, though I had trouble with the ATI video driver and never really got it to work properly. Getting both the wired and the wireless network to come up was unnecessarily difficult. The SLED 10 RPMs will not work with Mandriva, so you can’t get the modem driver, the system configuration tool, the power manager, or the wireless network manager that Lenovo provides under the ThinkVantage brand.
Ubuntu 6.06: Works, but none of the ThinkVantage utilities will install, and the modem driver provided by Lenovo won’t work either.
Ubuntu 6.10 knot 3: Failed to install — couldn’t detect hard drive. It’s odd that 6.06 worked but 6.10 knot 3 did not; this is, however, a beta test release and what I experienced may have been a bug rather than an omission.
Gentoo Linux 2006.1: Works, but none of the ThinkVantage utilities will install, and the modem driver provided by Lenovo won’t work either.
Fedora Core 6 test 3: Failed to install — couldn’t detect hard drive.
Freespire 1.0: Failed to install — couldn’t detect hard drive.
OpenBSD 3.9: Failed to install — couldn’t detect hard drive.
FreeBSD 6.2 beta 1: Failed to install, but the problems seemed to be FreeBSD-related, not ThinkPad-related. The disk was properly detected, sliced, and formatted, but the installation utility ended up failing later on for various reasons.
Officially supported – yes…. But it seems to to be somewhat limited support to judge from the author’s testings…
I would at least expect the harddrive to be recognized on every modern Linux distribution, but of course that could be a matter of lack of SATA support provided by the distos in mention… Odd though…
But why not install SuSe Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 if that’s what’s supposed to work (to judge from the comment on SLED 10 RPMs) ?
“I would at least expect the harddrive to be recognized on every modern Linux distribution, but of course that could be a matter of lack of SATA support provided by the distos in mention… Odd though… ”
True, and in the T60’s BIOS, there is an option to switch the SATA drive from AHCI mode which is default, to IDE compatibility mode. Once this is done, most Linux/BSD distros will install perfectly fine.
“True, and in the T60’s BIOS, there is an option to switch the SATA drive from AHCI mode which is default, to IDE compatibility mode. Once this is done, most Linux/BSD distros will install perfectly fine.”
That may be true — I didn’t test in compatibility mode. You forgot to mention, though, that there can be a significant performance loss in compatibility mode. There could also be problems with power management if you don’t use AHCI.
Forgot to put in the screen shot of the ThinkVantage applications in SLED 10. It’s now in the article, or you can see the graphic at this link:
http://www.hardwareinreview.com/images/thinkpad/t60/thinkpad_utils….
Edited 2006-10-04 21:37
It would be nice if you could buy it preinstalled and ready for use.
FTA: Battery life was outstanding, and if it isn’t outstanding enough for you, spend the extra money to get the extended 9-cell battery. Even working with several programs at once in KDE while playing music and browsing the Web, I could squeeze almost 3 hours of usage out of the 9-cell battery…
Since when is 3 hours of battery life “outstanding”? (And that was with the extended 9-cell battery??)
Exactly. I thought he’s gonna say 5-6 hours, especially with 9-cell battery. My 4 years old laptop (HP Centrino) runs ~ 3 hours with Mandriva+KDE, no problem. But then maybe it’s due to dual-core? I thought it supposes to consume less juice?
It was a typo — That’s 3 hours with the 6-cell, not the 9-cell. Sorry about that.
Thanks for correcting that.
I put Ubuntu 6.06 on my T60 with 9cell and 3cell ultray bay battery, I get 4.5/5hours, in Windows I get 8hours. I’m glad to hear that the ThinkPad utils are on Linux atleast on SUSE.
The state of powermanagement for *really* tweaking your laptop is horrible in my experience right now, but getting better faster as more folks are using laptops.
The ThinkVantage Power Manager in SLED 10 allows you to customize the following: display brightness, hard disk standby, and CPU frequency scaling. If you want to save even more power and don’t need wireless, switch off the radio transmitters and you can squeeze more time out of the battery. There is also a battery monitor that tells you all sorts of crap like what condition the battery is in, what its current, voltage, and temperature are, and about a dozen other details.
Maybe it’s worth switching to SLED 10? I know Ubuntu people are usually die-hards, but SUSE has all of the T60p-specific applications. I can’t say for certain that they would work on a T60, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t. I don’t believe the programs do any model-checking, but they are built against SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10’s configuration.
That’s fantastic, it sounds like they ported all the utils over. Thank you for letting me know.
…as people work out how to convert the SLED RPMs to DEBS and figure out what combination of old libraries the Laptop needs to use to work properly. Give ’em some time!
OTOH, I’d love to know how well this laptop supports OSX86….
–bornagainpenguin
“OTOH, I’d love to know how well this laptop supports OSX86….”
Interesting point, but why not wait for a Merom Macbook (Pro) instead?
Because fiddling with OSes and making them work well on strange hardware is fun? Because the more OSes a piece of hardware can run, the more valuable it becomes to me?
–bornagainpenguin
“Because fiddling with OSes and making them work well on strange hardware is fun? Because the more OSes a piece of hardware can run, the more valuable it becomes to me?”
OK
It seems odd that Lenovo would have Linux, not preload it, and not advertise that it’s available. As it is now, I doubt that most of their (already admittedly small) target audience knows about this.
This just seems like testing the waters, and seeing how many people care deeply enough about Linux on the Laptop to jump through their hoops.