Lenovo T500 (shiny new laptop)
Yesterday I exchanged my “old” Thinkpad T60 with a shiny new T500. This time I ordered a Thinkpad with integrated Intel graphics since it’s supposed to be way better supported than the graphic chips from ATI or NVIDIA under Linux. And of course it is supposed to be much more silent.
I don’t regret this decision so far, the new T500 is barely hearable even under heavy load.
Debian
I installed Debian unstable (aka. frozen for waaayy to long) without a problem. Sound worked out of the box, graphics worked somewhat. The kernel automatically loaded the correct modules but I had to tell Xorg that I want the “intel” driver instead of Vesa. Unfortunately Xorg’s intel driver in unstable is already too old to allow me to use an external monitor via the docking station’s DVI port, so I had to to upgrade to Xorg from experimental, which is not very cool since this is the machine I depend on at work.
Wifi also doesn’t work, since the the driver and firmware available in unstable are outdated. Suspend to RAM works sometimes, but most of the time the laptop refuses to wake up properly so I have to shut it down.
I’ve not yet tested if bluetooth and Wimax works.
So currently the T500 is usable under unstable but without external monitor and without Wifi. If you are brave enough to use packages from experimental, you get your external monitor to work but still don’t have Wifi. Suspend to RAM does not work reliably.
The T500 should probably work fine with Lenny but of course without external Monitor and Wifi support.
Vista
After I’ve installed Debian and moved my /home from the old laptop to my new baby, I noticed that silly “Windows Vista” sticker on my laptop. Of course I tried to remove that thing, which I regretted painfully.
After I’ve successfully removed the sticker – which was surprisingly hard – some glue remained on the surface of the laptop. No problem I thought, nothing some nail polish remover can’t handle. Unfortunately it only smeared the glue but did not resolve it as I had expected. So I’ve tried perfume, water, soap, rubber, tape and solvent for several hours, but was not able to remove the glue at all. All I achieved was to smear the compact but thick chunk of glue to a very thin but much more distributed layer of this nasty glue on my laptop. Now it looks like a 5x5cm square of dirt on top of my laptop – not sure if removing the Vista sticker was worth it.