As I hinted yesterday, I’ve been a bit preoccupied this week with the arrival of a new piece of hardware. Following some dialogue with Lenovo’s David Churbuck after my difficulty with an order they had, I find myself in possession of a brand new Thinkpad x60s. Let’s get the disclosure out of the way before I continue: Lenovo has given me this machine for testing purposes and asked in return that I blog my experiences. Easy enough.
One other thing should be noted: David was not the only Lenovo employee to take note of my post and rattle some cages. In the end, I ended up getting about half a dozen emails and voicemails to assist me with my order. Despite the attention, I decided to cancel it because I found the same drive for about a hundred dollars cheaper elsewhere, but if Lenovo got a failing grade for shipping performance, they get an A for customer relations and responsiveness. Much appreciate David and my other contact’s (they’ve decided not to blog it) support and attention. It’s amazing how simply responding to a customer’s concerns can not only address the initial negative impression, but reverse it completely leaving a net positive in its wake. And thanks to the persistence and relatively high ranking of blogs, these positive experiences will be, I’m sure, stumbled across frequently by anyone querying Lenovo and “customer service.”
I’ll have to put my more detailed review of the x60s off for a bit – particularly its Linux compatability – because at the moment I’m hung up with my installation of Gentoo Linux. First impressions were excellent but brief, because about 10 minutes after I first booted the machine I was shaving down the XP partition (using Acronis Disk Director) to carve out space for my Linux instance.
Installation from there went smoothly until I tried to boot into Linux for the first time and was unable to (the XP partition is just fine, and is there if I need it). Before anyone jumps to conclusions and decides either that x60’s are incompatible with Linux or that installing Linux on the desktop is hard, let me say that I’ve purposefully chosen one of the hardest installation procedures – a fully manual Gentoo setup. According to Thinkwiki, people have had little difficulty getting both SuSE 10.1 and Ubuntu Dapper set up on this model. While I may be forced into taking that route (I’ ve got Dapper downloading now just in case), I’m going to continue with my efforts to get Gentoo installed because that’s what I’m most comfortable with.
As soon as I get the situation resolved, I’ll follow with a full post documenting my findings, process, gotchas, and so on. In the meantime, you can look some initial pictures here. More of those once things work again.
