Ubuntu and the T61

I'm going to buy a 14.1 T61 early next month and I plan on installing Ubuntu on it, maybe even as my main os if things go alright. I have a few questions though.

1. How are the Linux drivers for the X3100?

2. Will the drivers run Beryl right after downloading the package?

3. How is the power management compared to Vista or XP? Would hibernate work by default or do I need to tinker?

4. Will I need to adjust the fans manually or should should I let Ubuntu handle it?

5. Should I adjust the graphics memory under xorg or is it alright on default?

6. I also noticed that when it comes to laptops, there isn't to much of a discussion on the Ubuntu forums. Does this mean Linux would work without any problems?

I really hate if any surprises ruin it for me so I just thought I'll ask this questions.

 

You might want to take a look at this site:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

 

Disclaimer: I've only owned Dell laptops but some of your questions are general enough in scope I think.

Be warned that Beryl and compiz are still unstable. Compiz crapped on me. (Compiz is not exactly the same code-base as Beryl but shares significant code with Beryl and is installed by default by Ubuntu.) Because of the instabilities and because it does not appear to be scriptable easily at this moment, I've reverted to sawfish (which you probably don't want to use).

Lenovo has a good reputation for following the ACPI standards pretty well I think but tinkering is always a possibility. I've certainly had to tinker with all my Dells.

I've never had to do that. I think on my Dells the BIOS itself is handling it.

I think it is fine by default but then again I have not used xorg for intensive graphic work much because ATI drivers are crap. Good thing you have an Intel card.

I'm not sure what the lack of discussion about laptops means. Ubuntu certainly works on laptops. I do find that the initial installation process ends rather abruptly however. What it does is install a functional Linux setup on your machine and a very basic set of applications (e.g. firefox). [ Edit: what follows is crap: OpenOffice *is* installed by default.] That's good but what about OpenOffice and all the *other* applications you might want to use? They are not installed by default. The initial install will put menu items for OpenOffice that if you click on them will start a download and install of OpenOffice. Nice but not great. [ Edit: crap ends here.] I recommend that after a fresh install you go to Applications-> Add/Remove and request to install all the applications you know you are going to use (or are likely to use). You should also look into Automatix and install it. It allows you to install packages that are useful but not directly maintained by the Ubuntu people, like Adobe Reader.

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Same on my Inspiron 6400. But if I want manual fan control, I have i8kutils installed.

Umm, OOo is installed by default. Atleast, it was for me in Ubuntu's 5.10 through 7.04.

But your suggestion about Add/Remove was good. But I'd stay away from Automatix. It may or may not break upgrades.

 

[ Edit: the following is incoherent blather...]
Were you upgrading or installing from scratch? I did a scratch install last week and OpenOffice was definitely not present. There were entries in the Applications menu for OOo that had little upward arrows (or maybe downwards... I don't remember) on them and dpkg -l showed that they were not installed. After installing, the entries in the Application menu lost their little upward arrows. I inferred from that that the initial entries with the arrows meant that Ubuntu was going to download and install OOo for me automatically if I had used one of those icons.

You probably know that already but just for completeness' sake: if you already have OOo installed on an older release of Ubuntu and just upgrade, it will remain installed and be upgraded to the OOo version that comes with the latest release of Ubuntu. However, this does not mean that the latest release installs OOo by default.
[ Edit: end of incoherent blather]

Hmm... yeah I see what you mean. I'm sorry to say that without Automatix, Ubuntu would not be a viable option for me. Adobe Reader is a requirement for what I do and so are several packages that Automatix provide. I'm willing to deal with the upgrade problems if and when they happen. I realize people with less Linux experience might not want to do that.

 

If you install a server version or a smaller version somehow, you won't get O . But it's definitely part of the standard distribution. It was installed with the X86-64 version on my laptop.

 

[Edit: move along... nothing to see here... pay no attention to the lunatic... In other words: this hypothesis was incorrect.]

I think I know what happened in my case. The network was not working during the install. Looking at the install logs that the installer left on my machine, I see that it tried to download package lists from the Ubuntu repositories but was not able to do so. I'm guessing that rather than crash or fail horribly, it silently ignores the problem but I wish there would be a warning about that.

 

OpenOffice is on the CD. I can boot into the LiveCD and use OpenOffice with no issues and no Internet connection. I've also installed 6.10 and 6.06 on a laptop with no Internet connection before and was able to use OpenOffice immediately. All I have at home is a crappy wireless router and my wireless card on my old laptop is recognized by the newer versions but not the older ones.

EDIT: To the OP, here are some sites with Debian installation on a T61:
http://www.klabs.be/~fpiat/linux/debian/Etch_on_Thinkpad_T61.html
http://tuxmobil.org/ibm.html

There's not many review right now, so you might have trouble. I'm not sure if there are any native drivers for the Intel 4965 or X3100 yet.

 

Hmm... yeah I confused myself somewhere. Looking at the dpkg logs I see that at least some parts of openoffice were installed during the installation of Ubuntu. I think now the little blotch I took to be an arrow is just a blotch.... perhaps the OOo birds were squished or something (sure did not look like birds). At any rate, the default install of OOo is not good enough for my needs so I have to install more than what the normal install provides.

 

I just bought a T61, and I wanted to mention: Beware of the Intel 4965 wifi. I chose that with better linux support in mind BUT the driver for it aren't out yet. Intel WILL be releasing linux drivers and that's why I chose it over the other adapters, but until they are released you are stuck with ndiswrapper.

 

aboutblank, how's the 4965 wifi with ndiswrapper going for you? I'm planing to buy something this summer and there's a good chance it'll have an Intel 4965.

 

Lemur,

I haven't gotten my T61 yet!!! Ordered 5/24 with an estimated ship date of 6/6 which changed to 8/28 and afaik, it hasn't shipped yet.

Oh, and intel says their 4965 wifi drivers will come out in late Q2 of this year.. so hopefully any week now.

 

Sorry man, when you wrote "bought" I assumed the whole process was over and you had your laptop in hand...

Yeah, that's what I heard through the grapevine. The bright side of your wait may be that you won't have to use the ndiswrapper.

 

Thanks for the heads up about the Intel wifi, I'm gonna stick with the standard a/b/g Thinkpad Atheros card anyways so I hopefully wont have any problems (it's a $$$ thing, not the drivers).

I heard that the standard 950 GMA card played pretty well with Linux but I wasn't sure if they had working drivers for the X3100 and I know what happens when you don't have capable drivers in Linux...

About 2 months ago I was installing 6.10 on my E6700 with a X1900XTX card. After booting into the live cd or after installing alternate I was getting a blank screen. For some reason the default drivers didn't want to run on my X1900 so after a lot of reading and trying out short cuts I finally got it to work. I can't remember the exact shortcut but I got the binary drivers installed and everything was going fine.

After doing that I tried to get my sound up and running but then I found out that there wasn't any X-fi drivers for my sound card . So after all that, I didn't have any sound so I just went back to using Xp and just use Ubuntu on my old pc.

If they do have any kinks to work out on the new chipset I bet they'll get it done during the summer.


One more thing I forgot to add in my original post, does Ubuntu scale the dpi on high res screens? I'm planning on getting the WXGA+ screen and setting the dpi up to at least 110 in Windows but I haven't heard anything on well Ubuntu does this.

 

You can change the DPI in Ubuntu just as you can in Windows.

 

Intel announced support for the X3100 (965GM). I believe the xorg-server-video-intel 2.0.0 driver may even support it. If not, it may take a while for it to percolate through to the Debian/Ubuntu package repositories.

Creative previously claimed they would have X-Fi support by the end of Q1 2007. They recently pushed it out to Q4 2007. Apparently getting Vista to work is proving to be a complete disaster. Who'da thunk it?

Schwab

 

Hey talic, I usually use gentoo, but am currently using ubuntu with my t61 (older kernel won't recognize the hard drive). Here's a couple of hints for when you install.

1.) Install with the alternate cd (text version) because neither the nvidia nor intel cards work correctly (i.e. the ubuntu load/install screen is just a bunch of garbage)
2.) If you have the 120 GB HD (the hitachi one) you are going to have to throw it into "compatibility" mode in the bios.
3.) The intel display drivers WORK, but the screen is fuzzy. (because it is trying to just resize a 1024x768 res screen), so you have to do some manual editing of the drivers. (read the tutorial about it on the thinkwiki site that is linked earlier in this thread). This really isn't a big deal if you've had some exposure to linux, but might be a bit intimidating if you don't have much experience
4.) The current intel drivers don't play nicely with OpenGL right now. That means things like google earth, blender, xscreensaver will cause X (display server) to crash.
5.) You will have to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to support 1440x900 display settings.
6.) Install the 32 bit version (its kind of just preference, but I recommend it). A LOT of programs don't have 64 bit support out yet, which means you have to build them as 32 bit apps in a 64 bit environment if you use the amd64 disk. This is possible, but is a bit cumbersome, and still doesn't work perfectly with some software. 32 bit is a lot easier, and most things will not benefit that much from 64 bit architecture anyway (unless they were specifically built for 64 bit).
7.) ndiswrappers are the only way to get the intel wireless card working at the moment. (Some people on the forums have been reporting constant disconnects, but I haven't had a problem). HOWEVER, intel recently released linux drivers ( http://intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi) for the wireless card. This means there will probably be a debian package for it in the next month or so.

Good luck.

 

The drivers for the 4695 Wireless card are available from http://intellinuxwireless.org/