Thinkpads Forum

i know ibm comes with suse sled 10. but is there a better distro that works with tp hardware?


mod edit: moved to linux forum where it will have a wider audience.

K/Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Most every thing works out of the box. I did have to change a setting for the middle button to work with the trackpoint, but not much else.

openSUSE works good.
For nVidia card and intel wireless card you may need to install the drivers manually.
The hibernation was a problem, may corrupt the KDE.

BTW, Seems no distro works good with the power management.

i think i want some functionality of linux but i had a hardtime with ubuntu's wireless config which makes me think putting opensuse on the thumbdrive is the way to go. what do you think?

fr0zenmon,

I have the T61 with the Intel 3945 and it's worked fine with Ubuntu. 8.04 is using Intel's driver for the wireless.

The only issues I've had were no LED light and Network Manager not connecting automatically to hidden SSIDs. Other than that, it's been fine.

I think about (and have tried) other distros but I keep coming back to Ubuntu because I know it the best.

Lenovo offers OpenSuse as an Operating System. I imagine there would be some if not a lot of support for it. I haven't tried that particular distro though.

See my review of PCLinuxOS MiniMe running on my T61:

http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2008 ... nkpad-t61/

Part two shows you just about all you need for a great setup.

I am also running Mandriva 2008.1 on my Thinkpad and everything works, except maybe Suspend to RAM, but I never use that feature.

{Edit} Note however that "Mandriva One" comes without support for more than 1 GB of RAM. (Weird, I know.) Here is the info on how to change the kernel to support more RAM. I just found out about this. I think I will give it a try tomorrow.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Erra ... 0MB_of_RAM
{/Edit}

On a 7658 CTO I've had great luck with Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10, as far as sleep, hardware support, etc goes. OpenSuSE 10.3 works pretty well but is still using a somewhat older kernel(Compared to the others mentioned).

rm wrote:
{Edit} Note however that "Mandriva One" comes without support for more than 1 GB of RAM. (Weird, I know.) Here is the info on how to change the kernel to support more RAM. I just found out about this. I think I will give it a try tomorrow.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Erra ... 0MB_of_RAM
{/Edit}

It worked fine. Before changing kernel, free reported 1 GB of RAM. Now, free reports the full 2 GB of RAM on my system.

aiiee wrote:Gutsy Gibbon

I'm running it as the only operating system on my T61. Most of features/buttons work out of the box, everything else I had up and running after some investigation and a couple of days (mostly streaming content, etc.). I did a clean install from scratch a few weeks ago and was up and running, fully functional, in about 1.5 hours.

I'm really happy with Ubuntu 7.10. It's great to have a kernel that does not require anti-virus software.

[quote="aiiee"]K/Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Most every thing works out of the box. I did have to change a setting for the middle button to work with the trackpoint, but not much else.[/quote]

Did you manage to get the volume control keys working? I've got a T61p and the volume control keys don't seem towork even though I have tpb and thinkpad_acpi installed. Though, the brightness control seems to work just fine. I think the T61p has some new hardware involved with the volume switches tpb does not support.

Any thoughts?

mrnaz wrote:

aiiee wrote:K/Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Most every thing works out of the box. I did have to change a setting for the middle button to work with the trackpoint, but not much else.

Did you manage to get the volume control keys working?

System > Preferences > Sound > Default Mixer Tracks - Makes sure the device is set to ASLA and "PCM" is selected. It defaults to the microphone for some reason.

[quote="pailhead"][quote="mrnaz"][quote="aiiee"]K/Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Most every thing works out of the box. I did have to change a setting for the middle button to work with the trackpoint, but not much else.[/quote]

Did you manage to get the volume control keys working?[/quote]

System > Preferences > Sound > Default Mixer Tracks - Makes sure the device is set to ASLA and "PCM" is selected. It defaults to the microphone for some reason.[/quote]

Thanks muchly for the reply. I don't seem to have a "Preferences" in my System group. Is there a package I need to install to get that? I've looked under Settings as well, but it's not there either.