Which OS to use...?

[l33boy]

Hi Guy's, great forum here, what a find

Anyway, I've got myself a T41 and I'm only going to be using it for web browsing, basic word processing and connecting to a printer every now and again.

Thing is I love stripped out 'fastest' systems and was about to do my usual nlite XP install when I thought of Linux....

Never tried it before so why not now with a clean install.

Simple question really, is Linux that much quicker and would there be any driver issues?

Thanks for any input you can give a Newbee

[craigmontHunter]

Welcome to the Forum
Linux runs fine, I have two problems with Ubuntu, in that the graphics chip does not go into power saving mode, leaving me with 1hour battery life (xp gets 2.0 - 2.5). The other problem is that the fan runs constantly, nomatter what when linux is loaded.

Other than that, it runs fine, all the effects work. If you get any answers to the problems, please post back, I would like to be able to run linux.

Jack

[l33boy]

Welcome to the Forum
Linux runs fine, I have two problems with Ubuntu, in that the graphics chip does not go into power saving mode, leaving me with 1hour battery life (xp gets 2.0 - 2.5). The other problem is that the fan runs constantly, nomatter what when linux is loaded.

Other than that, it runs fine, all the effects work. If you get any answers to the problems, please post back, I would like to be able to run linux.

Jack

Thanks for the welcome Jack, and thanks for the feedback.

OK so the battery life could be killer, when I get browsing I can be on for hours
I take it that the HD will go into powersave?

The fan isn't an issue unless it starts to fail of course.

I quite like the look of MEPIS so I'll look a little deeper I think.

Anyone else with known issues?

Cheers guys

[Tasurinchi]

Ubuntu is very popular, has a big fan base and also a good forum. I'm using it in my X4x machines and it works great, it's fast, stable and it's free.

There are other Linux distros that you may want to try as well. Linux Mint, open SuSe and Fedora may be options too (I think the latter may not be suitable for beginners, but is still a renown distro). Check some other threads in this forum, there's plenty of information there.

My 0.02 cents...

Cheers

[Harryc]

I'd recommend Linux Mint over Ubuntu for a first time install on a Thinkpad mainly because multimedia (functionality, CODECS, etc) works out of the box.

[l33boy]

OK thanks guys, not wanting to change this into a Linux Distro thread, I take it the problems are limited to the second post.
I'll give Mint a try this evening and see if I get the same issues.
Should be fun

[ThinkRob]

Hm... I was relatively sure that even the notoriously finicky ATI drivers had some sort of power-saving mode...

Found it. Yep, according to ThinkWiki fglrx has better power-saving support -- but it appears that both drivers have some form of power-saving.

[craigmontHunter]

Hm... I was relatively sure that even the notoriously finicky ATI drivers had some sort of power-saving mode...

Found it. Yep, according to ThinkWiki fglrx has better power-saving support -- but it appears that both drivers have some form of power-saving.

If you look at the bottom of the page, it lists the Mobility radeon 7500 as a unsupported GPU, which means that so far, we are still SOL.

If anyone has any other systems, I would be interested in running linux as well.