Linux on a Thinkpad X61

My X31 which I repaired a while ago died again. This time I think the system board is gone, as there are no signs of life. Nothing I do, even plugging in a power cord (and I tried several), will make any of the LEDs light up. It is functionally equivalent to a brick.

I decided to purchase a Thinkpad X61 instead of a replacement system board. I chose to stick with the Thinkpad X series for several reasons. For starters, Thinkpads endure. Well, apart from my X31, though it still outlived other brands I've tried. I even have an old Thinkpad 240 that's still running strong.

Another reason is that I want a good balance of small footprint and performance. I went through a phase long ago where I thought the biggest baddest laptop that money could buy was the right choice, but after trying it once, I discovered clunkiness destroys half the appeal of a laptop, and furthermore, a cheap desktop with accessories will give a much better computing experience.

But most importantly, Thinkpads have a good track record with Linux support. Nonetheless, I did a few quick Google searches to confirm that this was the case for the X61. Happily there are many results.

My X61 arrived last month, and with Vista installed by default. Vista is astoundingly bad. Not only is it slow, but every few actions, everything grinds to a halt until I handle some dialog box about giving permission to some process or other.

I suppose some effort was put into making the interface look slicker, but there is also plenty of extraneous rubbish that serve only as visual distractions and annoyances. Perhaps Microsoft is not entirely to blame, as some of the pop-ups are plastered with the Lenovo logo.

In any case, my new system was unusable. I had to escape from Vista. It had been a long time since I had last installed Linux, as once setup correctly, there's rarely a reason to reinstall. I spent some time learning about the latest installation methods.

Network Installation

There's no need to prepare a floppy, CD or any other kind of removable media. Visit http://www.goodbye-microsoft.com/ from any version of Windows, including Vista, and you can have Debian up and running within minutes.

Note UNetbootin is a similar program for Ubuntu, but Vista support is still in the works.

There was one small hiccup. The Debian-installer loader ran fine, but a reboot brought be back to Vista (taking forever to load of course). After further research I discovered that I had to mess with the BCDEDIT program to set a nonzero delay so I could actually select Debian from the Vista boot menu.

Then deja vu. I was reminded of the first time I tried installed a Linux desktop: back then, it must have taken me a day to get sound working, and another for the network.

The wireless didn't work. Neither did the sound. The "vesa" graphics driver performed badly: switching back to text mode resulted in a blank screen. This system is too new for Debian.

I had read success stories using the development version of Ubuntu ("Gutsy Gibbon"), and a few unsuccessful attempts at getting the wireless working I figured I'd switch.

I tried to do so with UNetbootin (run from Debian) but I must have screwed something up because I was left with an unbootable system: the Grub bootloader had taken over the master boot record, and was somehow configured badly. To salvage the situation, I used a PXE network boot, and from a menu option I installed Gutsy.

The wireless network card (Intel 4965) worked out of the box, as did the "intel" video driver for X windows. Back when I first tried this, and before Gutsy was officially released, sound didn't work and I had to download and compile the development version of ALSA's "hda_intel" driver to rectify this. But the latest version works out of the box.

Various buttons such as the brightness and volume controls have no effect, but if I were so inclined, I could fix this by scripting commands with the aid of the ibm-acpi package.

Mission Accomplished

My laptop is now usable. Not only that, but it is orders of magnitude faster and smoother than any other system I use. I have more to say, but rather than delay this post yet again, I'll save the material for future articles.