Thinkpads Forum

I'm hopefully going to receive my T60 very soon, my first thinkpad, and when that happens I want to make myself a dualboot system.

Now I've just got to choose which disto that I should use.

I've read a bit in the forum and googled a bit, looked at thinkwiki.org and it seems that people have been able to install a wide range of distro's.

I'm choosing between ubuntu, suse, gentoo, debian and fedora.

So I would appreciate some input on what works, and what doesn't work.

Kim

Welcome to the Thinkpad Forums, Kimx


Well, it all depends on what you want to do with it and how much experience you have had previously with Linux. Ubuntu is perhaps the easiest to install out of all of those; gentoo has some pretty interesting properties and concepts as well. With debian, you would most likely have to go and roll your own setup and tweak things until they get just the way you like them. SuSE and Fedora are a good blanace of features and ease-of-use.

What do you plan on doing with it?

I'm mainly going to use the laptop in my school work. So the linux part is mainly going to be used to write latex and other forms of code.

I've had working installations of both ubuntu and gentoo on my old laptop, but I wasn't able to decide which one I liked the best. Gentoo was a bit of a hassle, but I feelt a bit to restriked in ubuntu.

I normally prefer to use fluxbox or similar as my window manager, so the build time for gentoo isn't to bad.

The reason why I'm choosing between these distro's is because my university's network has a mirror of these distros, and my dorm is also connected to this network(giving me 5MB/s download).

My friend has Gentoo on his R40 and it works fine, except it took awhile for the various emerges to complete.

I use Fluxbox on Ubuntu on my T43 and it is very fast and fine; the few downsides to Ubuntu is that there are certain things that you might have to change if you go deep into it. Same goes for Gentoo.

What I realy wanted to know, was if there was some serius show stoppers with any of the listed distro's. I haven't been able to find any, I just wanted to make sure

kimx wrote:What I realy wanted to know, was if there was some serius show stoppers with any of the listed distro's. I haven't been able to find any, I just wanted to make sure

At this point? I can't think of any "show stopper" that prevent those distros from running well on any Thinkpad. Except for the latest ones, but that is only because driver support and the rest have to mature which is always the case. I will let you know if I think of any major problems with any of those.

Xandros.

Is the latest version of Ubuntu compatible with T60? The last time I checked, the finger reader, video driver are two of the most glaring gap there.

I have ubuntu 5.10 on my T23,T42 and for the most part, it did the job...don't know if it improves since then

kimx wrote:I'm hopefully going to receive my T60 very soon, my first thinkpad, and when that happens I want to make myself a dualboot system.
[snip]

Whatever the distribution you pick, at the moment your video card is not supported by drivers, either Free or proprietary from ATI. Until this is resolved, your video will be on sluggish VESA.

The only other somewhat problematic component in the specs your signature is the ipw3945. There exists a project on sourceforge for its drivers, so follow along and you should get it working.

I will recommend Fedora Core, or one of the many RHEL rebuilds. Because I am a Red Hat fanboi.

I recently received my T60p (2623DDU). I have so far tried installing SuSE 10.0, SuSE 10.1 Beta 9, Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 5.10.

Right now I am running Fedora Core 5.

SuSE 10.0 is out. Cannot install because of the SATA drive - drive was not found.

SuSE 10.1 Beta 9. Installed fine. It is a beta release and some packages and updates are not available with the standard tools.

Fedora Core 5 is what I am running right now. Install went really good. Pretty much worked out of the box.

Ubuntu 5.10 did not detect the network card (e1000). Once it booted I was able to configure the network.

The problem with all of the above is the lack of display driver for the ATI v5200 in the T60p. I have Fedora working in VESA 1600x1200x24 right now. I was able to do the same with SuSE 10.1.

There are drivers for the Intel 3945 wireless card - I have the wireless card working just fine in Fedora. The driver were not in release until earlier this week so I didn't try them with SuSE or Ubuntu but they should work just fine.

I haven't had a chance to try and get the fingerprint reader working but that is next on Fedora Core 5 for me.

I hope this helps.

-Joe

I have successfully installed Gentoo on my T60. You have to use the vesa driver for xorg to work, the ipw3945 drivers work also though they were tough to set up.
HDAPS (parking of the harddrive's heads) isn't working as the HDAPS module is not recognizing the T60 as compatible. I also wasn't able to load the thinkpad module package (tp_smapi etc...) which gives support for battery chargeing control and other thinkpad functions.

As gentoo is a source based distro you have to compile everything yourself, but thank to dual core it's really fast. With gentoo I like the good documentation and the helpful forum they got. Ubuntu is also really good when it comes to this. On the other hand, with debian I made the expierience that alot of users are a bit arrogant and just tell you to RTFM.
In the end it all comes down to your personal preference. You could download the LiveCDs most distros offer and try them on your machine. But don't expect everything to work out of the box, as the T60's hardware is pretty new...

Thanks for the input.

I think that I'm going to try fedora core once I get my thinkpad.