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.
rick gregory says:
July 18, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Stephen,
You probably will anyway, but please detail your experience in getting wireless running. When I got a new drive for my T42 I decided to check out Dapper… Everything worked wonderfully except for the wireless drivers. Since that’d kind of basic to me I’m back on XP after 10 days of troubleshooting.
Yeah, I know… the X60 probably has a different card (the T42 has the 2200B/G MPCI card). But still…
Donnie Berkholz says:
July 18, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Rick, the Intel 2200’s ought to work super well in Linux, I’m surprised you had problems with them. The driver’s in the kernel now, and all you’ve gotta do is install the firmware.
stephen o'grady says:
July 18, 2006 at 4:52 pm
rick: certainly will. i suspect, though, that you’re right and that my findings will be irrelevant. the x60s has either the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Mini-PCI Express Adapter or the ThinkPad 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini Express Adapter (Atheros chipset), of which mine has the latter. my x40 had the ipw2200 firmware which worked like a champ, however. no issues whatsoever. try starting here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Intel_PRO/Wireless_2200BG_Mini-PCI_Adapter
Donnie: agreed – the 2200 stuff tends to work well with either the available drivers or the kernel versions.
Anonymous says:
July 18, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Oh, great, now you have me thinking of switching back… just what I need… more hours dedicated to tweaking with my machine…
Donnie – yeah, the driver’s in the kernel… but it’s 1.11 (a dev version). Even with the 3.0 firmware I’d drop connections every few minutes. And, at the time, others on the forums were having issues.
Must… resist… temptation…
Oh, and Stephen – thanks for the link.
cisco says:
September 20, 2006 at 2:57 pm
I recently installed Suse 10.1 on a ThinkPad x60 but I cant seem to be able to connect to wireless networks. My wireless card is Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Mini-PCI Express Adapter and I’m using KWiFiManager as the wireless LAN client manager.
Can anyone point me to a potential solution? Would it be that the drivers need updating to be able to handle linux? Or, is it simply that this card does not support linux yet?
stephen o'grady says:
September 20, 2006 at 3:01 pm
cisco: i don’t have that card, so i can’t be that much help, but do check out the Thinkwiki.org page on it – it might help:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Intel_PRO/Wireless_3945ABG_Mini-PCI_Express_Adapter
i’d also check out the Thinkwiki howto’s – i think one or more of the installers had the Intel chip rather than Atheros i have.