Ubuntu 10.04 for T60

[lifrancis]

Last year I was ranting about Linux being too geeky for my liking because some of the programs and drivers were not available in a compiled form.
Yesterday, I downloaded the new Ubuntu 10.04 and gave it a try on my T60. It installed very quickly, and everything seems to work right out of the box, this includes the wifi card, video card, bluetooth, and, to my surprise, my Logitech web cam and my bluetooth mouse. There is now a new Ubuntu Software Center where I can search and install programs without putting on my geek hat and start compiling codes.
I think Linux has finally grown up and is now ready for mainstream use.

[BruisedQuasar]

i have burned the major Linux distros to CD and tried them out two times a years for several years. I believe it safe to say today that certain Linux distros have reached the point where they are MORE user friendly than Windows.

The following projects are dedicated to making a Linux that is very user friendly, stable, secure, small and fast as possible

DSL (abbreviation for D___ Small Linux as the software foul language utility doesn't allow the first word of the actual name) currently dormant project due to team disagreement with the founder.

PuppyLinux (small like DSL) very active project. Beginning with Puppy 3.XXX superior to DSL. Great for older computers, especially laptops
The teams recent release Lucid (Puppy) 5.0 will blow your socks off in its small size, power & speed and user friendliness

Ubuntu family remains very popular but I think there are today much faster, much smaller and even easier to use distros. I much prefer a renegade (non official Ubuntu Distro) Ubuntu to anything Ubuntu, LINUXMINT 9

gOS - currently a dormant distro but certainly worth looking at. Unusual distro. Project team is presently working on a cloud computing distro

Open Geu very friendly desktop worth looking over

Currently the Linux distro I have installed on a T-23, T60, a Dell GX60, GX620 & a XPS 400 and I use the most is LinuxMint 9... For three years I used Ubuntu & Xubuntu but I think they have become too big and slow. I love how fast Linux Mint 9 boots and is ready to use and how quickly it shuts down. I also use Lucid (Puppy) 5.0 from a 2GB USB stick for Web surfing.

I strongly recommend that people new to Linux try Linux only on computers at least two years old or older. Linux projects are forced to always be behind the curve on new tech, as Microsoft Monopoly Cartel members refuse to cooperate with Linux projects. To be fair to smaller mere multimillion dollar companies, I must mention that Microsoft does brutally punish corporations for assisting Linux projects and Linux users. Hewlet Packard (printer division) is a notable exception. HP has been very cooperative with Linux projects and supportive of Linux users who buy HP printers.

[bloovis]

I'm using Linux Mint 9 (a very nice derivative of Ubuntu 10.04) on an R61 and an X41, and it's pretty decent. But then, I've been using Linux on ThinkPads since 1999 and have learned how to solve problems when they come up. I was also happy with older versions of Mint on the R61 and an R50p (the X41 is new to me so it never had anything older than Mint 9).

That said, Linux is always a bit behind the curve on the very latest hardware, since almost no hardware manufacturers bother to create Linux drivers for their whiz-bang new devices. So it takes a while for the (mostly volunteer) driver writers to reverse engineer undocumented hardware (the worst case) or implement support given new hardware specs (the best case). This is one possible reason why you're happier with Linux now on your T60 than you were last year: the software has had some time to catch up with the hardware.

[twillis449]

I upgraded my T60 (14 in SXGA+ model) from Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 a month or two ago and found that the wireless Internet connect seemed to drop out after a half hour or so. Consequently I re-installed 9.10, where the wireless connection works flawlessly. Various queries out there in Internet land suggest that other people have encountered similar problems. I have the Intel 3945 abg card.

[thinkpad1]

I find that Linux is doing things so that it doesn't work as well on old machines. Well, not necessarily, Linux in general.

I mean, ATI decides not to support older cards so you have no choice but using the OSS driver. So, whatever shape it's in or whatever support they've given to the old card is WHAT YOU GET.

There are other issues such as old drivers or whatever they decide to do with regards to the kernel. All of a sudden, some drivers, modules or hardware support is integrated into the kernel.

I have various experiences in which one distro works differently on my T41 from another. The two distros are Debian-based but I have different experiences. To me, this is alarming. I think it means things are changing and depending on what one distro does, something might or might not work even though I never changed the hardware.

Before, one could rely on distros that were in the same family but now there seems to be a lot of developers that are branching out. I think the 'techie' term for this is 'fork.' Yeah, that's it - fork. They fork one distro based on something else and then your experience of it might be different than the original. I don't know if that's good but on old hardware, I don't think it's very inspiring.

[ThinkRob]

I upgraded my T60 (14 in SXGA+ model) from Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 a month or two ago and found that the wireless Internet connect seemed to drop out after a half hour or so. Consequently I re-installed 9.10, where the wireless connection works flawlessly. Various queries out there in Internet land suggest that other people have encountered similar problems. I have the Intel 3945 abg card.

In all fairness, that's not really the driver's fault.*

The 3945 and 4965 cards are pretty flaky as cards go, and the 3945 is particularly bad. The drivers are fighting a bit of a battle against the hardware when it comes to reliability -- that's the same reason that the power management functionality in those two cards is disabled: they become quite unstable after suspend when power management is enabled, so in the interest of stability the power management functionality has been hard-coded off.

* (Source: Me. I've done a bit of kernel hacking, and have played around with the 3945/4965 drivers a decent bit, as a few of my machines have had them. That, plus my experience using the actual hardware has led me to believe that it's not really the driver's fault.)

[alofano]

My Original RnR and Product Recovery CD's that came with my T60 are corrupt so I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and everything works A1 except the cd/dvd does not read DVD's. Other then that numéro uno. I don't understand why use M/S when you can install Linux in about 20 min vs 3 hrs for M/S.

[twillis449]

An update - I replaced the intel 4965 card by an atheros a/g/n card and re-installed ubuntu 10.04. The wireless disconnects seem to have gone away.

[ThinkRob]

An update - I replaced the intel 4965 card by an atheros a/g/n card and re-installed ubuntu 10.04. The wireless disconnects seem to have gone away.

Sounds about right. My experience with the 3945/4965 and WPA2 networks was that the cards had a lot of bugs when not in sw_crypto mode, and just generally didn't play nice with WPA2-AES. Atheros cards, on the other hand, have always seemed to work just great.

[sysiphus]

Sounds about right. My experience with the 3945/4965 and WPA2 networks was that the cards had a lot of bugs when not in sw_crypto mode, and just generally didn't play nice with WPA2-AES. Atheros cards, on the other hand, have always seemed to work just great.

Interesting. I've got the 3945ABG card in my T60, and have had zero problems on F13 connecting to my home WPA2 network. Maybe I'm just lucky

Regardless, the T60 seems to play very nicely with current Linux distros, no question. Almost everything works perfectly out of the box...the only exceptions being IRDA (really don't care) and the 56k modem (again, doesn't touch my life). Yet another reason to love Thinkpads--generally speaking, if it doesn't work perfectly with Linux out of the box, there's usually a swappable component to fix the problem.

[Tasurinchi]

nteresting. I've got the 3945ABG card in my T60, and have had zero problems

Same here, albeit with 10.10, I use WPA2 and could connect to the Internet without any issue. Also Linux Mint 9 went ok (which is based on 10.04, right?). Both running from USB sticks, as my T60 has no optical/hard drive yet.

I think I also have a 3945ABG on my X60 (not 100% sure if it's ABG or just BG) and I'm using Linux Mint 9 with no issues since about two months...

[ThinkRob]

Perhaps I should clarify: the issues I experienced were with a WPA2 Enterprise (AES) network. I don't think I've run into any long-standing issues with WPA2 Personal networks.