Thinkpads Forum

Hello

I have a Thinkpad T41 and i decided to install Linux on it. In the past, i used to work on a HP dv1000 and suffered to get everything to just work, and pretty sure some Hardware are now dead! I received an abandoned Thinkpad from my Uncle and seeing everything in it works perfectly i don't want to damage it with installing, testing and etc.......

The reason i`m asking for help is that the whole Thinkpad system with all its protection software and security measures scare me really!!! ex. the HD airbag-like system when you move your thinkpad.....

I need advice on a Distro. that best suits and is fully compatible and stable for the T41.

I have searched around ( Here, thinkwiki, Ubuntu-forums, etc) but couldn't find a direct answer!!!

For what i know, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, and Open SUSE are the best for my taste. I just don't want to exhuast my new notebook before i can even start using it!!! Also i know that the Hardware is well supported, but i have no clue regarding the management of the whole hardware (like the CPU, GPU, Hardrive, and the fan)

BTW Linux will be the only OS on it as i can't financial afford a new Windows budget on a third computer!!

Thank you in advance

Welcome to the forum!

That T41 should have come with a Windows XP CoA, so you can use restore media, or dual boot.

As for Linux on that machine, I am a fan of Fedora, but Ubuntu and SuSE are also really good choices. If you want to set it up once and let it go for a long time, also consider CentOS or Ubuntu LTS (long term support). To me, these are all good choices because the developer communities are large and stable, and the user bases are large and helpful. (Go into the #ubuntu IRC channel some time!)

If you're like most Linux users, though, you'll want to play and try lots of distributions.

ThinkWiki is good for a technical resource (and I contribute there), but it's not so good when you don't know what to install or why. I'd suggest you join the Linux ThinkPad Mailing List and ask there... or just go get Fedora, Ubuntu and SuSE and install each of them for a while and try them out. Easy peasy.

I can say that Ubuntu 7.04 will work 100% right away, with no work.

aaa wrote:I can say that Ubuntu 7.04 will work 100% right away, with no work.

The same goes for (K)(X)Ubuntu 7.10.

whizkid:

First thanks for the welcome..

What scares me the most is that i don't want to go back to trying out alot of distros before i settle on one. As i said before, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Open SUSE are the ones that seem appealing to me, and have huge support base. I will probably try each one separately for a good amount of time before i stick with one. I will draw on which to start with first, and hope that the first choice works fine! I don't really care about package management, etc.... as i will only need just some plug-ins and Multimedia codecs.

Thank you again

aaa wrote:I can say that Ubuntu 7.04 will work 100% right away, with no work.

i agree with 7.04, i had it on another system and it ran perfectly. (it just needed an extra 10 mins of a couple of fixing, but that happens with any Distro)

syedj wrote:The same goes for (K)(X)Ubuntu 7.10.

i never tried 7.10. I read a couple of reviews on it and some say it works perfect and some say it doesn't. But seeing you said it works in a Thinkpad forum, i then guess it does!! i will have to draw between the two!!!


Thank you all for your help

I have Ubuntu 7.10 running on my T40p and all I can say that it is pretty much flawless. Everything works out of the box, just a little tweaking of xorg.conf to get the Trackpoint middle mouse button scrolling support for Firefox, Opera and other apps. No reason to go with 7.04.

As you can see the general consensus is usually that Ubuntu will work out the box at least almost flawlessly.

However I personally prefer Fedora and found that on my T41p the only things that didn't work was wireless. I had to compile the Madwifi driver myself. But now I hear it's available as a package, which means it's basically a one-click install akin to running a 'setup.exe' say on a Windows machine.

http://www.fedoraforum.org & http://www.fedorafaq.org, both brilliant resources. FedoraFAQ especially will show you the most common routes to answer common problems. Give them all a try!

The only one problem with Fedora for the beginner at the moment (To be fixed in the upcoming Fedora 9) is that you have to partition your current NTFS partition first, with another tool, if you want to dual-boot.

Another distro that will work out of the box is SuSE. I've had 9.2 Professional installed on various T4x models and it works with no tweaks.

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 yesterday and spent alot of time on it.

I can say it's a dissapointment for me because although it has some minor bugs that are fixable, when Flash, Firefox, and Compiz Fusion come together it just fails and uses 100% of system resources!! I installed 7.04, less buggier than 7.10 but still uses up to 95% of the system and i can feel the CPU and GPU on 7.04-7.10 are working really hard!!!!! Another thing, the fan is 85% of the time on it's full working capacity!!!!!! I`m really dissapointed in the Ubuntu 7+ release, and hope 8 will be better.

I`m still confused that 7.04 ran perfect on a HP Pavillion but on a thinkpad not so much!!!!



I`ll be downloading Fedora Core 8 and pray theres still hope!!!!

Compiz worked out the box on my T41p, and that's without proprietary drivers.

I hope Fedora 8 goes better for you.

You can also try Debian 4 (from which ubuntu is derived). I have on my 600X and T23 and it after some tweaking, it runs great on both of them.

Dead1nside wrote:Compiz worked out the box on my T41p, and that's without proprietary drivers.

I hope Fedora 8 goes better for you.

Compiz worked as well as all the hardware

the problem is when compiz is running along Firefix and i`m on a site that requires flash..... the whole system just freezes!

for the sake of fairness i've tried XFCE (Xubuntu) and it barely managed to run...... i don't care much about Compiz, i only did that just see how the OS handles under load

gator wrote:You can also try Debian 4 (from which ubuntu is derived). I have on my 600X and T23 and it after some tweaking, it runs great on both of them.

For what i know Debian is not easy as Ubuntu but more stable. I don't mind tweaking a distro till it works. I may try it sometime



I`m now installing Fedora 8 lets see how it goes

OK

i spent a couple of days on Fedora 8 and pretty much it works!!!

At first a spent a good 4 hours trying to make everything work from updates , compiz, FN keys, multimedia, and finally arabic language support.

The system runs smoothly with no freezes at all, well i had to upgrade my ram from 512mb and add another 256mb from my dv1000 and they both work at the same frequency.

I`m planning on sticking with Fedora for a long time.

In the end

Thanks for everyone who submitted their opinion

I couldn't be more happy for you mate!

Fedora is a great distribution, and one that always has cutting edge features being rolled into it. I love it's art direction, it's package management and all it's tools. Simply a great OS. Looking forward to Fedora 9.

K-lite wrote:I installed Ubuntu 7.10 yesterday and spent alot of time on it.

I`m still confused that 7.04 ran perfect on a HP Pavillion but on a thinkpad not so much!!!!

I`ll be downloading Fedora Core 8 and pray theres still hope!!!!

Which HP do you have? A lot of the newer laptops out there have the Intel X3100 graphics chipset and for wireless, the 3945 WiFi. It is easy to assume many distro developers have concentrated heavily on these two hardware components (to name two examples) and the support for them are probably improving.

I'm also interested in which distros works well on Thinkpads, but, specifically T4x Thinkpad models since that is probably the one I'd be getting.

I have tried Fedora on a desktop and although I liked certain parts of it, I found wireless to be a pain. I wanted to configure manually since, imho, all the built-in wireless programs don't work but had major problems. It didn't help that I am used to Debian-based distros and configuring those manually. If I go with Fedora, I'd have to learn an entirely different system (besides RPM-based).