[ltp] What to take care of when buying a Lenovo?

[Phil Shotton]

I run a T60 and a T60p - with Ubuntu (Feisty, then Gutsy). The main 
things to watch are:

    * Wireless cards. The Intel cards seem to be well supported, the
      Atheros less so. My T60 had Intel and worked out of the box with
      Ubuntu. The T60p has the Atheros card and the only way I could get
      it to work is with the ndiswrapper - but it works fine with that.
    * Graphics cards - the main problem. NVidia cards work fine (I
      believe) but be prepared for some grief with ATI cards especially
      if you want twin-head and/or hardware 3D. With my T60p the only
      way I could get decent twin-head graphics support was by compiling
      the very latest radeon drivers.
    * Suspend/resume - particularly in association with ATI graphics
      cards. Using the open source x drivers solved that one for me.
    * Sound can occasionally be a problem to get going - but it's been
      fine for me

This list is superb and I've personally had a lot of support from it, 
especially with problems with the ATI graphics cards (thanks Alex). The 
other main source of excellent help is the thinkwiki site 
www.thinkwiki.org. Once everything is sorted you'll find the T6xx series 
superb workhorses. I've been using thinkpads for nearly 10 years and I 
wouldn't use anything else. My usage is mainly programming, mixed with a 
lot of travelling.

Phil

Tobi wrote:
> Hello!
>
> While searching for a new notebook with the following basic parameters:
>
>   - CPU > 2 GHz, at least 4 MB L2 Cache
>   - 2 x 2 GB RAM
>   - SATA > 250GB, 8MB Cache
>   - 15,4" display (non-glossy)
>
> ...I was recommended to take a look at the Lenovo T60 / T61.
>
> I would like to run Linux on the notebook and keep Windows XP or 2008
> (for doing some VisualStudio development) jailed in a VirtualBox.
>
> Is there anything I should take care of, when buying a Lenovo notebook
> for Linux? Any trouble with specific hardware components, unsupported
> features or missing drivers? Any trouble running a 64-bit Linux?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tobias
>
>
>