[ltp] IBM ThinkPad R51 1830-BRG - experiences?

[Malcolm Northcott]

I just got one similar to this last week (R51 with Radeon 7500 (i
think), the 40Gb drive and 768Mb, no Firewire, no S-Video, no IR). I
loaded it up with Fedora Core 2 (2.6 Kernel). It seems to work pretty
well. though there are a few issues. 
One generic word or warning is that the Ultraby changed size some time
in the last three years, I now have a number of useless ultrabay
batteries etc from my old A20p.

Things that I have not got working yet.
1) Centrino wireless, current Intel drivers apparently don't support WAP
so I'm sticking with my Netgear PC card for now. The Netgear card works,
but I have had one incident of it behaving badly requiring a (soft)
reboot to fix. As you point out Linuxant should allow you to use the
windows driver, but I think I will just wait till Intel gets their act
together.
2) Haven't managed to get the thing to sleep yet. On my old A20p closing
the lid put the computer to sleep. Most of the /proc/acpi entries seem
to have sensible contents, so I guess this is more of
a user space setup problem. In fact I saw your post while browsing for
clues on the solution to this problem.
 
Things that do seem to work
----------------------------
1) Screen works great, fc2 was able to set up the 1400x1050 resolution
without any problems. Screen seems to have better color than the old
A20p.
2) Built in ethernet works fine, at least at 100Mbit, have not tried it
at a Gbit.
3) Speed scaling seems to work, I downloaded CPUFreq from dag, it mostly
shows 600MHz, but if goes up to 1.5GHz if I start soaking the CPU.
4) Sound works.
5) Both the touchpad and trackpoint work simultaneously.
6) The USB works (at least with my camera and Palm).
7) DVD writer works (at least for CD-R).


Things I have not tried yet;
----------------------------
1) Not tried the Modem. because I really don't have much use for it.
2) Parallel port
3) External monitor, I'm wondering If I can set up dual head using the
external monitor. I think it might work (it works with the 7500 AGP
card). This would actually be very useful, because one painful thing is
changing screen resolution to use those damn LCD projectors. If I could
set up the external monitor to run as a separate head at 800x600
resolution, that would make life easier.
On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 11:25, Frank Hornung wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm searching for a Thinkpad, that satisfies my needs and works well under
> Linux.
> The model I would like to buy is the following:
> 
> IBM ThinkPad R51 1830-BRG
> Mobile Intel Pentium M, 1700 MHz, 400 MHz Front Side Bus, 1024 KB Level 2
> Cache
> 512 MB PC 333 DDR RAM
> 80 ,0 GB ATA-100 Hdd 4200 U/min
> DVD Recordable: CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW DVD-RAM, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM
> 15 Flex View TFT-Display, 1400x1050x16,7 Million Colors
> ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, 32 MB DDR-SDRAM
> V.92 Modem (56 Kbps Daten, 14,4 Kbps Fax)
> 10/100/1000 Ethernet
> INTEL PRO/Wireless LAN 2200 BG Mini PCI Adapter
> ThinkPad Nav (TouchPad + Trackpoint)
> Sound Blaster Pro 16 kompatibles Sound System
> Parallel, 2 USB 2.0-Ports, external Monitor, S-Video out, Infrared,Firewire
> (IEEE 1394)
> Headphones, external Mic, RJ-11 Modem-port, RJ-45
> Ultrabay Enhanced
> 
> Which components do work and which one do not?
> Especially, is it possible to use 1400x1050 Display Resolution? Is the
> DVD-Recordable suported? etc.
> I assume that the netwok card is a Intel PRO/1000, but do not certainly
> know.
> I have already seen at sourceforge that there is a project for the Intel
> PRO/Wireless 2200BG, but there is no driver available until now. In case
> there is no Linux driver I plan to use Linuxant driver loader.
> 
> I want to use Debian testing/unstable and Suse9.1
> 
> Thanks everyone for the help!
> 
> Cheers.
> Frank 
> 
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