ubuntu on sl300

[rakusson]

has anybody installed ubuntu on SL-300 machine?

[portens]

Fedora 10 mostly worked out of the box. The brightness controls were reversed until the latest updates were applied. Sound works, but I still don't have the volume buttons working. Compiz, ethernet, wi-fi all work fine. I haven't tried the SD card reader or the express card slot.

A recent Ubuntu should be a cinch.

[supremedalek]

I do not know if it helps you any but I installed ubuntu 8.10 64bit in my SL500 without an issue. In fact, I am typing on it right now. If you have not wiped the old OS (and ideally not used it that much), I would suggest you to first use something like clonezilla to make a copy of the contents of the disk. This way, if you need to get hold of tech support (say, just in case they refuse to consider Linux as a supported OS), you can still go back to a "supported" OS.

[garytr23]

yes i and others have done it, there's some threads around about it.  Anything in particular you're worried about?

[rakusson]

I'm not worried about driver imcompatibility but issue regarding boot. As vista has different boot manager than XP, so  I was wondering if there will be conflict with Ubuntu boot manager. One more thing, do Ubuntu (latest version 8.10) has any problem regarding SATA HDD?

[garytr23]

no, that's easy.  You may have to partition manually during install, though.  ubuntu's boot loader (grub) lives on the MBR and can boot any partition, from which point vista's loader takes over.  Pretty sure ubuntu will even make a boot entry for Vista.  There's plenty of documentation on the net about it, u're not the first person to try :-).

[Viktor]

I've found a great driver that fixes some problems running Ubuntu on SL300: http://github.com/tetromino/lenovo-sl-laptop/tree/master

And here is an excellent guide to that driver: http://gianlucamagalotti.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/lenovo-thinkpad-sl-series-hotkeys/

[TinCanFury]

when I got my SL400 a few weeks ago I just went and installed the latest Jaunty beta and it works great. KDE 4.2 with the nvidia GPU is *awesome*.