Linux on the T42

[jmargaglione]

I am looking at a T42p as a field notebook for customer support of our systems. All of our systems run Linux internally, and I would like to be able to replicate my build environment on the T42 as closely as possible, including the Mandrake 10 distro and a ton of C and Java code/environments.

I have read that the T42 works beautifully with Linux, but there are a few things I can not determine, such as:

1. How does the battery last on Linux compared with WinXP? The only utility I have seen to handle different power modes is cpufreqd, which changes the frequency depending on the idle state of the computer, but it doesn't look like it knows when you're on battery or not. Is there a way to reduce the screen brightness, turn off the optical drive, etc.?

2. Is there a specific wireless option that works better than others? I see that there are Aetheros drivers, but I'm not sure the Intel chipset is supported yet.

3. It looks to me like all of the resolutions XGA, SXGA and SXGA+ are supported under XFree86, and all but the middle mouse button is supported. Anybody have problems here?

Any other issues that Linux users have experienced is welcome! I've been a Linux user for a decade, and I'd love to hear from someone about how well this laptop is supported.

Thanks a ton,

John

[jmargaglione]

Just noticed the whole FORUM devoted to Linux. This site is the cat's meow.

John

[Chun-Yu]

Well, I don't have a T42p but I do have a T41.

1. It doesn't last as long, but with the 9-cell, I can still get probably 4.5-5 hours while using wireless. I have read that using a patched version of the X ATI driver that supports PowerPlay extends the battery life, but I haven't gotten around to trying this yet. If I remember correctly, this driver is only good for up to an M9, so it wouldn't work on your T42p anyway :-\.

2. Intel wireless cards are now pretty well supported in Linux - see http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/ and http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/

3. No problems here, in fact, the middle mouse button *does* work perfectly (which is a HUGE plus for cut+paste).

Overall, Gentoo is very usable for me, and the only slight complaint I have is that the battery life isn't quite what I would like it to be with the 6-cell (like, maybe only 3 hours or so). On my T41, ACPI seems to be pretty broken (after suspend+resume, the network and sound drivers break shortly after) but APM works quite well. If only I could get ACPI+PowerPlay working...then the battery life should be just under what you get in Windows XP.

[Guest]

Hi
I installed the SUSE9.1 and the sourceforge wireless driver. No errors during the installation. I don't see the wireless LED on when I boot into linux and also I can't connect to web. Is there any other configuration I have to do apart from loading driver.? Where do I see the errors ?

Thanks

[jmargaglione]

I am using Mandrake 10, and all I did was install the madwifi_* packages and reboot. The automatic hardware detection picked up the card and assigned it ath0. I then went in through the drakconnect utility to assign it a static IP for my network. It works just fine.

I don't know that SUSE used the same configuration files, but check in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ for a file named ifcfg-ath0 or -eth1. If that file is there, try running, as root

ifup ath0

And see if the light goes on. You might have to edit /etc/modules.conf to load the correct module at startup if it was not automatically detected for you.