Wednesday evening, I called the support to report that I was not satified with my battery. I had lost 25% of its capacity over less than 8 months.

Thursday morning, I am recalled by someone from the technical service. They first say that the battery is no more under warranty – 1 year long. I guess they say so after checking when the battery was made or sold the retailer. That does not concern the end-consumer like me : the warranty only started when I purchased the laptop, and I still have 4 months of warranty ahead.

As they asked, I send them by fax the bill which proves that, thursday afternoon. Soon after, they recall me again, just to tell me that a new battery is going to be sent to me.

Friday morning, it arrived ! So far, so good !

Next time, I may test it again concerning this issue (not so terrible in fact, and I am reluctant to send back my laptop).

About laptop PC, I have always been conveiced that the best pieces of hardware are found among Sony and Lenovo (ex-IBM). In tough or ultra-light categories, I would add Panasonic, but it is not the kind of laptop I am looking for.

So this time I am giving a try to Lenovo. What really decided me is its old fashion screen, I mean a non-bright one. My eyes are really getting tired with all these new bright laptop screens. Plus, its resolution is impressive : 1440 x 900.

So far I am pretty satisfied. For my need, the 14.1″ screen is the best compromise, and so is the weight and size of the laptop.

Without surprise, the keyboard and the trackpoint are just excellent. I also aprreciate some features like the hardware encryption of the hard drive, which also benefits from the active protection (head parking in case of shock to protect the data).

The laptop built and design are not as nice and polished as the Sony ones, but it is certainly solid.

After I took it just out of the box, I thought I would give a look to the pre-installed Windows Vista system. But the first startup appeared to be so long that I quickly stopped it in the middle of its process, inserted a fresh Debian Lenny 64 bits CD and went for a set up.

I worked pretty well out of the box. Like usual, I had to download the Intel Wifi firmware and the proprietary nvidia driver to use all the features of my Quadro NVS 140M graphic card.

More annoying, the active protection is not supported by default by the kernel.

I also have a problem with hibernation. Suspend to RAM works well, but resuming after suspend to disk always leave me on a blank screen. I guess this is related to the graphic driver, but so far the workaround that I found from other users don’t work for me.

Other things, including the fingerprint reader, work pretty well.

There are a number of guides from the ThinkWiki website that helped me a lot. Among them :

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_Lenny_on_a_ThinkPad_T61

Set up the active protection (patch and recompile the kernel :( ) :

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_Lenny_on_a_ThinkPad_T60#hdapsd

Get the fingerprint reader work :

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThinkFinger

However, after a few days, I realized that I was not satisfied by the responsiveness of the laptop, and especially the way it managed multiprocessing. I also wanted to use the active protection for my hard drive.

I decided to compile my own kernel, more optimized than the generic AMD 64 one provided by Debian.

Here is an excerpt from my .config file activating some features for a Core 2 Duo Intel processor – this apply to the latest version of Linux today, 2.6.24-2 :

#
# Processor type and features
#
CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y
CONFIG_NO_HZ=y
CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS_BUILD=y
CONFIG_SMP=y
CONFIG_X86_PC=y
CONFIG_MCORE2=y
CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_BYTES=64
CONFIG_X86_INTERNODE_CACHE_BYTES=64
CONFIG_X86_CMPXCHG=y
CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=6
CONFIG_X86_GOOD_APIC=y
CONFIG_X86_INTEL_USERCOPY=y
CONFIG_X86_USE_PPRO_CHECKSUM=y
CONFIG_X86_TSC=y
CONFIG_X86_MINIMUM_CPU_FAMILY=64
CONFIG_HPET_TIMER=y
CONFIG_HPET_EMULATE_RTC=y
CONFIG_GART_IOMMU=y
CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU=y
CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU_ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT=y
CONFIG_SWIOTLB=y
CONFIG_NR_CPUS=8
CONFIG_SCHED_SMT=y
CONFIG_SCHED_MC=y
CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY=y
CONFIG_PREEMPT_BKL=y
CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC=y
CONFIG_X86_IO_APIC=y
CONFIG_X86_MCE=y
CONFIG_X86_MCE_INTEL=y
CONFIG_X86_MCE_AMD=y
CONFIG_MICROCODE=m
CONFIG_MICROCODE_OLD_INTERFACE=y
CONFIG_X86_MSR=m
CONFIG_X86_CPUID=m
CONFIG_NUMA=y
CONFIG_K8_NUMA=y
CONFIG_X86_64_ACPI_NUMA=y
CONFIG_NODES_SHIFT=6
CONFIG_ARCH_DISCONTIGMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_ARCH_DISCONTIGMEM_DEFAULT=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SPARSEMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_SELECT_MEMORY_MODEL=y
CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM_MANUAL=y
CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM=y
CONFIG_FLAT_NODE_MEM_MAP=y
CONFIG_NEED_MULTIPLE_NODES=y
CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS=4
CONFIG_MIGRATION=y
CONFIG_RESOURCES_64BIT=y
CONFIG_ZONE_DMA_FLAG=1
CONFIG_BOUNCE=y
CONFIG_VIRT_TO_BUS=y
CONFIG_MTRR=y
CONFIG_SECCOMP=y
CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR=y
CONFIG_HZ_1000=y
CONFIG_HZ=1000
CONFIG_KEXEC=y
CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START=0x200000
CONFIG_PHYSICAL_ALIGN=0x200000
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU=y
CONFIG_ARCH_ENABLE_MEMORY_HOTPLUG=y
CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_EARLY_PFN_TO_NID=y
CONFIG_OUT_OF_LINE_PFN_TO_PAGE=y

The important differences with the standard kernel are :

• the timer frequency set to “1000 Hz”,
• processor familly to “Core 2”
• preemption model to “Voluntary”

I am seeing now better performance in threading and global responsiveness – including, believe it or not, with the compiz effect, what I didn’t expect at all.

At the end, I just have hibernation not working : it is nice to see how good the support of Debian Lenny is, thought the hardware is pretty recent. Things are really improving quickly.

If you have some issue installing Linux on your Thinpad, post your problem here. I will be happy to help you as much as I can.