Welcome

[carbon_unit]

Are you a Linux enthusiast or are you just curious about "The dark side"? There are many questions to be asked about Linux on your Lenovo. What works on which machine? What doesn't? Does Lenovo officially support Linux. Which Distro? Which one do you prefer and why?

Please. no holy wars.

Please read the rules of this forum, and keep the discussion civil - spirited discussions welcome but no ranting or raving.  We'd like to all enjoy the forum, the mod team included!

Let's keep it civil and spread the knowledge. With your help Linux can shine on the Lenovo desktop.


Message Edited by carbon_unit on 11-24-2007 10:49 AM

[Esteban_Lenovo]

My experience is that Both SuSE and Ubuntu work with out of the box installations in the machines I've tested. Red Hat required some configuration, so did Mandriva and Gentoo.

What I haven't been able to work so far is:
-the play, pause, next and previous fn + arrow key buttons and some other fn + key shortcuts (I know it can be mapped... haven't got a chance yet to play around)
-The browser shortucts just by the arrow keys.

I have a couple more answers to Carbon's questions, but I'll let the community chime in


Message Edited by Esteban_Lenovo on 11-26-2007 10:38 PM

[Whizkid]

I'm a Red Hat/Fedora fan. And I love my 600X. Unfortunately, there's been a bug open for four years on the sound driver for the chip in the 600X. Sound doesn't work after suspend/resume. Truly aggravating and the main reason my wife wouldn't let me put Linux on her 600X. (Now she needs MS software for work, and uses XP and Office 2003 on her T42. Bah!)

My T60 runs Fedora 8 very well. I would like to get everything working at the same time, but right now if I use ATI's driver to get 3D, suspend hangs. Oh well.

I suppose someone should mention www.thinkwiki.org, where I contribute what I can. There is a lot of good information there. Come on over and chip in.  

[Esteban_Lenovo]

---

@Whizkid wrote:
[...]

I suppose someone should mention www.thinkwiki.org, where I contribute what I can. There is a lot of good information there. Come on over and chip in.  

---

ThinkWiki is an excellent resource, yes. Maybe you can start a thread with the ATI issue on this same Linux board...

[Lorenz_L]

I'm using Ubuntu Feisty on a IBM/Lenovo T60. I've always had IBM/Lenovo laptops and they never disappointed me. Excellent service, excellent hardware.

I've switched to Linux about one year ago as I simply got fed up with viruses, spyware and blue-screens.
Ubuntu worked almost out of the box- I got some issues related to my graphic card (ATI x1300) and the desktop effects (Beryl, Compiz), but after some work and reading it works smoothly now.

There are some issues, however:

• shorter battery life (in fact, my battery is down to 1min after just about 8 months - does the guarantee cover that?)
• sleep/hibernate won't work and none of the workarounds that I tried worked either - this is acutually very annoying
• It seems to me my laptop gets rather hot, I haven't heard the fan on full power yet and I wonder if the ACPI settings are correct.
  

That's everything that comes to my mind now. I've read a website from Lenovo/IBM that posts tips for reducing the battery consumption, however, I'm not technically capable of following those advice. It's all a bit too complicated for an average user. Would be great if you could release some .deb files of those programs or perhaps an IBM ThinkPad specific Kernel or something

[Esteban_Lenovo]

Lorenz, nice to see a fellow Ubuntu-user in here.

I have a couple of questions and observations, if you don't mind.

Regarding the Lenovo-spacific deb files I don't think it's that much of an excellent idea. Part of the beauty of Open Source is that it yields Choice; wether you like Solaris, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu or whatever flavour you feel fond to you should be able to use it. Specifically supporting a distro or package-system would go in detriment of the other options out there; and supporting every single one of them is plainly impossible (there are too many options, which is good in its own way).

The real answer, IMHO comes from many of the comments on Matt's "inside the box" post on Linux (@ lenovoblogs): opening up the standards would allow different distro-builders to work on brand / hrdware specific support (at a very low cost). This is easier to say than to do, of course; but I'm quite convinced that is the smart path to follow.

I wonder what the issue with your battery is; can you post some details about your usage of the battery (# of cycles, whatever oter things you might find relevant)?

Regards,

[Lorenz_L]

Hi Esteban,

I understand your arguments concerning the deb files.
I agree that it would be too much to ask from Lenovo (or any other computer producer) to specifically support various Linux distributions. It should indeed be no problem for the Ubuntu community to come up with deb files or  include them in the Ubuntu universe/multiverse so they can be easily installed, if they have access to the source codes. There have been some positve signs recently, of enhanced cooperation of hardware manufacturers and Linux, I hope that goes on.

About my battery, I'll try to find a way to read out more information, for the moment this is all I have:

Percentage charge: 1%
Vendor: Sanyo
Technology: Lithium ion
Serial number: 10418
Model 92P1137
Capacity: 33% (Poor)
Current charge: 0.2 Wh
Last full charge: 18.8 Wh
Design charge: 56.2 Wh

The problem is that the battery won't charge - it stays at 1% all the time, even if plugged in when the computer is shut down. It's very annoying, because obviously my laptop is no only of use when I plug it in. I never used up a battery within 1 year and I wonder if there is something wrong with the battery I got.

[buddinggeek]

hello there
i would give my fullest appreciation to lenovo for providing out of the box support fot linux distros
i use a lenovo 3000h system and the following distros have worked like a breeze
1.redhat enterprise linux
2.suse enterprise linux
3.ubuntu
4.mandrivia
5.fedora core 7
6.pc linux os
7.linspire
8.solaris developer edition
9.turbo linux
10.kubuntu

KUDOS TO LENOVO FOR PROVIDING SUCH GREAT OUT OF THE BOX SUPPORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!