Lenovo Launches Linux Laptop and Leaves Lots of Questions (eWeek)

I own 6 thinkpads, and I'm about to buy the 7th one. All of them run Linux.

My first Thinkpad with Linux on it was the 701CS, aka Butterfly, bought back in 1996, one of
the coolest notebooks ever produced. This is the one where the keyboard slides to the side to
give a full-sized keyboard for a subnotebook, see http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:701CS for
a picture.

And the best: it's still (yay!) running (Slackware) Linux, with its whooping 32 MB main memory
and 360 MB hard disk. Of course, hand-tailored, no modern distribution is content with such
miniscule sizes any more.

My last installation of Ubuntu was just two weeks ago, on a T41 that ran previously openSUSE.
The main gripe I have with the Ubuntu install is that it doesn't get the framebuffer modes
right while booting, the vga kernel parameter doesn't work. (It worked with SUSE.) Probably a
problem with missing modules in initrd or so; I didn't bother to work it out and simply boot
it in basic screen mode.

Ubuntu supported the T41 hardware rather good; WLAN, bluetooth, CPU powersave mode etc.,
worked out of the box; laptop mode is activated. (I started to hate NetworkManager, though.)
For support of sleep/hibernate, I needed to install a Thinkpad-specific package (tbp), Ubuntu
did not do so automatically. Then the Fn-keys worked. That package had a small configuration
error that prevented the lid-close event to trigger suspend, easy to resolve if one knows a
bit about acpid. openSUSE was a bit better to support these stuff automatically, also without
any proprietary kernel modules. I expect that I'll need to tune my power consumption, but
that's the case for all Linux laptops.

I don't play games on the system, this is for working. Thus, the open source graphics drivers
are sufficient for me. YMMW.

Best, Joachim