What is a drop-dead simple distro for T61?

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JonathanGennick · #1 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 9:16 pm

Hey, I've a question. I'm thinking of popping a spare hard-drive into my new T61 and having a go at a Linux install. If I wanted to go for the most drop-dead simple install possible, where everything "just works" afterwards, is there any particular distro that you would recommend?

It's important that sleep/wake work reliably, btw.

Lenovo ships a version of Suse with their new, Linux-based models, don't they? Would Suse then, be my best bet?

Would Red Hat Enterprise work without any fuss?

I realize I can just try a bunch of distros to see what happens. I'm just hoping to save some trouble and benefit from your experience.

stkris · #2 Post by **stkris** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:53 am

I have no ThinkPad yet, but I'd try Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu so you'd have lots of apps available, and it does a more complete install of multimedia and other 3rd-party drivers so more stuff just works.

JonathanGennick · #3 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 10:22 am

Don't laugh, but I just realized my spare hard-drive probably won't be any help. It's a PATA drive. I'm willing to be that the T61 uses SATA drives.

I don't want to mess with dual-boot or anything like that.

#4 Post by **carbon_unit** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 1:04 pm

Most linux distros will work as a live cd. That way you can see if it does what you want before you install it on a hard drive. Just make the cd, boot with it in the cd drive, press f12 for a boot menu, select cd drive and press enter.

tylerwylie · #5 Post by **tylerwylie** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 1:08 pm

Fedora 8(9's coming out soon as well), OpenSUSE 10.3, and Ubuntu 7.10 all work just fine on my Thinkpad T61. When you boil it all down they're pretty much very similar.

madcow · #6 Post by **madcow** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 1:41 pm

Ubuntu 8.10, Apha 6.

You can install it from Windows onto your C drive. You don't need to mess with your hard drive. If you don't want Ubuntu anymore, just go to C:/ubuntu and run the uninstaller and it will remove the Ubuntu files. It's so nice..

JonathanGennick · #7 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 9:33 pm

tylerwylie wrote:Fedora 8(9's coming out soon as well), OpenSUSE 10.3, and Ubuntu 7.10 all work just fine on my Thinkpad T61. When you boil it all down they're pretty much very similar.

Does sleep/wake work?

What about watching DVD movies. Can you do that out of the box?

icantux · #8 Post by **icantux** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 10:31 pm

Linux Mint is one distro that installs easily and everything works - no fuss, no muss. Not dissing other distros (I've used many) but if you're seeking to install a distro and having/expecting everything to work "out of the box" then go with Linux Mint. It's Debian based (as is Ubuntu), so you'll have no trouble finding either packages or user help in your quest to run a very stable system.

tylerwylie · #9 Post by **tylerwylie** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:37 am

JonathanGennick wrote:
tylerwylie wrote:Fedora 8(9's coming out soon as well), OpenSUSE 10.3, and Ubuntu 7.10 all work just fine on my Thinkpad T61. When you boil it all down they're pretty much very similar.
Does sleep/wake work?

What about watching DVD movies. Can you do that out of the box?

None of them do that out of the box, but it is very simple with howtos on the web to get DVD playback working. Sleep works beautifully too(I can attest to all 3 of those sleep working)

tylerwylie · #10 Post by **tylerwylie** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:37 am

icantux wrote:Linux Mint is one distro that installs easily and everything works - no fuss, no muss. Not dissing other distros (I've used many) but if you're seeking to install a distro and having/expecting everything to work "out of the box" then go with Linux Mint. It's Debian based (as is Ubuntu), so you'll have no trouble finding either packages or user help in your quest to run a very stable system.

Linux Mint is really based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian. Same difference however.

JonathanGennick · #11 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 7:29 am

tylerwylie wrote:None of them do that out of the box, but it is very simple with howtos on the web to get DVD playback working. Sleep works beautifully too(I can attest to all 3 of those sleep working)

What about on Lenovo's pre-installed Linux? Does anyone have experience with one of those models? I'm guessing that Lenovo would make sure to have sleep/wake working. But do they also make sure that DVD playback works out of the box?

rm · #12 Post by rm » Mon Mar 10, 2008 1:22 pm

JonathanGennick wrote:
tylerwylie wrote:None of them do that out of the box, but it is very simple with howtos on the web to get DVD playback working. Sleep works beautifully too(I can attest to all 3 of those sleep working)
What about on Lenovo's pre-installed Linux? Does anyone have experience with one of those models? I'm guessing that Lenovo would make sure to have sleep/wake working. But do they also make sure that DVD playback works out of the box?

I have read that the pre-installed Linux Lenovo machines do have working sleep/resume out of the box, but I wonder how reliable that function is. You see, that is a feature that is still a sore spot for Linux in general. Here are some quotes from Linus Torvalds where he has expressed criticism for the current state of the acpi specification:

"Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce"

"The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at _any_ point pretty **** ugly."

But, in spite of that, the Linux kernel team is still hard at work trying to make it work. The latest kernel, 2.6.25 (still in release candidate status), is supposed to have some significant improvements on that front.

While this may not be exactly what you are after, at least hibernation works fairly well, at least it does for me on my Thinkpad T61 running PCLinuxOS.
http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2008 ... 61-part-2/

I tried suspend resume on PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu), and Mandriva. It failed on all three of them and I didn't bother trying to get it to work. Fortunately, I don't really need that feature.

JonathanGennick · #13 Post by **JonathanGennick** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 3:06 pm

rm wrote:I have read that the pre-installed Linux Lenovo machines do have working sleep/resume out of the box, but I wonder how reliable that function is.

It could be one of those things that either works reliably, or doesn't work at all. I had my wife's R40 running Suse 10.something for about two years, and sleep/wake worked perfectly. OTOH, my daughter has tried umpteen distros on her cousin's Gateway, and in all cases "to sleep" = "to crash"

.

Sleep/wake is pretty important to me though. It's one of those non-starter type things. It has to be there for me to even be interested. I want to be able to open the lid quickly, do something, and slam the lid again.

Despite setting my wife up with Linux on her R40, I've stayed with Windows all this time. But now that I've a new laptop for my job, the idea of moving my personal life over to Linux intrigues me. I'm keen to try out Linux on a Thinkpad for myself. Not sure whether I'll order one of the preconfigured models, but I'm thinking hard on the idea.

tylerwylie · #14 Post by **tylerwylie** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:53 am

Linux on IBM/Lenovo hardware runs beautifully. I've never had issues with sleep/wake on a Thinkpad, I'd definitely recommend it.

indiglo · #15 Post by **indiglo** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 6:42 am

As a linux newbie, I recently installed suse10.3 X64 version on my T61 7664-16U with dual boot of my Vista. Most of the functions work not bad after small tunning. I started with the ThinkWiki: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installin ... inkPad_T61.

I also add some software repositories when installed, since the network card could be recognized without problem. Thus the Kernal was patched automatically to Linux 2.6.22.17-0.1-default x86_64. After this initial setup, my T61 works 90% well. For the suspend to ram/ or disk. The ThinkWiki documents work good on suspend to disk, but fail on suspend to ram. However, after dig more information from here, http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Laptops/IBM, and refer to this link, http://carrot.hep.upenn.edu/wiki/doku.p ... end_to_ram.

The suspend to ram is working perfect now!

Two things if I want to criticize is...
1. I haven't succeed on compiz, compiz-fusion effect. I'm afraid to try this again, since my first trial end up with a black screen, which I have to re-install again.

2. The T61 wireless indicator is not light-up. Though wireless really works. I hope someone knows how to make it lights up.

Hope this works for you all.

ajkula66 · #16 Post by **ajkula66** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:44 pm

I don't have a T61 to test it with, but if yours has a NVidia card you may want to give Dream Linux 2.2 a shot...very interesting.

I'm using Mint, but on much older hardware than yours (A31p). It works like a charm, though.

#17 Post by **carbon_unit** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 7:11 pm

I'm running Mint on an R61 with the Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M chip and it works fine once you enable the restricted drivers. Compiz works and I even get the rubbery windows.

icantux · #18 Post by **icantux** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:19 pm

carbon,

Any issues with the install (NVS 140m)? was it text-based install or safe-mode?

#19 Post by **carbon_unit** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 6:20 am

I booted into safe video mode (vesa) and then installed. After booting the first time the restricted driver manager comes up and you can install the video drivers.
I have 2 problems:
The indicator light doesn't work on the 4965AGN wireless but the wireless itself works.
The sound works but the volume control doesn't work properly, The buttons control the wrong slider but you can adjust the correct slider with the cursor. Mute works. This probably could be fixed but it is not a big enough deal for me to put any effort into.
No distro is drop dead simple.

Paul Unger · #20 Post by **Paul Unger** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 3:51 pm

carbon_unit wrote:No distro is drop dead simple.

Your honesty is refreshing in an "It just works" world! If it was drop dead simple, it wouldn't be a computer would it?!

The fun is getting it to work (at least it's fun when it finally does work; getting there can be frustrating at times).

I'm currently trying to regain access to the Linux portion of my dual-boot setup. I had to reinstall XP, which overwrote the GRUB. A friend helped me restore the GRUB, but now it get an access error when I try to boot to Ubuntu . . . but that's fodder for another thread.

#21 Post by **carbon_unit** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 5:54 pm

Does it give you an error concerning the UUID?

Paul Unger · #22 Post by **Paul Unger** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 8:46 am

Time for that new thread.

doog · #23 Post by **doog** » Wed Apr 09, 2008 8:59 am

I could be wrong but I think that the Thinkpads they are selling come loaded with SLED.
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/
Which is the paid version from Novell.
SLED 11 is coming out pretty soon. And I really would be tempted to get it.
I have messed with SLED 10 only on desktop, and it was really stable.
And better to configure than Open Suse out of the box.
Of course that's part of what your paying for.

JonathanGennick
I have a R40 and have run Open Suse and PClinuxOS on it with little problems.
In fact I'm running Suse 10.3 on it right now.
Ubuntu is also good.
But I am a KDE guy.

Edit: here is preload link.
http://www.novell.com/news/press/lenovo ... notebooks/

pailhead · #24 Post by **pailhead** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 6:12 pm

JonathanGennick wrote:Does sleep/wake work?

In Ubuntu on a T61 it's very easy to make sleep and hibernation work

LINK

What is a drop-dead simple distro for T61?

What is a drop-dead simple distro for T61?

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