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

Vincent C Jones linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:40:58 -0500


I'm running SuSE 10.3 on a Lenovo X61 (hard to beat the size & weight).
The only things I found which did not work out of the box were: 

1 - Hibernate worked but suspend to RAM was disabled (needed to add
params "-f -a 3" for s2ram).

2 - SD card slot & USB slots were disfunctional (needed to add
"irqfixup" to boot parameters until release of Jan 08 BIOS).

3 - Hard drive active protection system (HDAPS) only has sensor support
in main stream kernels, but no support for head unload. Posted patches
work on SuSEified kernel sources.

4 - SuSE release of Intel 4965AGN drivers do not support 802.11n.

5 - Had to uninstall 64 bit Firefox and replace with 32 bit version to
get Java plugin support. (General 64 bit problem, not unique to Lenovo).

6 - Volume and brightness buttons are not mapped correctly. Events are
generated and command line controls work, so it is just a matter of
tracking down the scripts SuSE uses and adjusting them appropriately.

As always, your mileage may vary. Check out the posted solutions for
whatever models you are considering, watching out for configuration
specifics such as graphics chip and installed miniPCI cards. 

Good luck and have fun!

Vince

On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 23:43 +0100, Petr Praus wrote:
> Hmm, your issue with 4965AGN is quite strange, because I use my R61
> with 4965AGN running SuSE Linux 10.3 to connect to our WiFi network on
> daily basis without any problem at all. It was just a matter of
> installing two packages (iwl4965-ucode and iwlwifi) - there's really
> no need to compile your own kernel ;)
> Same applies for Gentoo and Arch which I ran before SuSE (= no need to
> do anything special - just install two packages)
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> On 3/8/08, Michael B Allen <ioplex@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Tobias,
> >
> >  I just got a new T61 and the Intel 4965AGN wireless doesn't work. The
> >  driver isn't even in any distro Kernel I know of. But, Intel has a
> >  driver so it seems like it's mostly just a matter of time for it to
> >  make into the stock kernels (I'm hoping CentOS 5.2 will have it). So
> >  if you want to use wireless, you'll have to compile your own kernel
> >  and then block the kernel from updating or symbol versioning is going
> >  to break your wireless every time you update (unless the updated
> >  kernel includes the new driver of course).
> >