Starting a week with Ubuntu and Lenovo's X61 ThinkPad: First impressions

I finally decided to put my OS where my mouth is. Or, at least, where my typing fingers are. I'm typing this from a Lenovo X61 ThinkPad...running Ubuntu 7.10. I'm going to spend the next week or so reporting on the experience, including some first-person accounts from the lady who has cut my hair for the past 21 years, Valerie, and my grandma, whom I've noted before has been locked out of the Linux experience.

Well, today we're going to see just how much substance there is to my prior contention.

Before I begin, I have to admit that I'm going to be biased by the hardware I'm using...in a positive way. Before switching to the Mac, I was a hardcore IBM ThinkPad devotee. This is my first experience with the post-IBM ThinkPad, and it's an impressive piece of hardware. Equally important for this review, it seems to work flawlessly with Ubuntu.

(Credit: Lenovo)

This is an exceptional piece of hardware, and surprisingly affordable (around $1,000 for the model Lenovo loaned me). It's super small yet has a full-sized, spacious keyboard. I could see myself using this. The keyboard isn't quite as responsive as a MacBook Pro keyboard, but it feels solid, responsive, and makes a satisfying "click-clack-click" when I type.

Interestingly, everything on the keyboard works with Ubuntu. Everything. Lenovo doesn't officially support Ubuntu on this hardware but you wouldn't know it from the experience. All of the specialty keys work and when I told Ubuntu to tell the system to put the X61 to sleep when I closed the lid, it did so without asking me, "Why?"

With Windows turning annoying since Microsoft left Windows 2000 (the last version that I really liked), for me there are only two choices left: Mac OS X or Linux. If my experience with Ubuntu on Lenovo's X61 ThinkPad continues to go as well as it has until now, I might even say it's a drag race between Mac OS X and Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn't make a fetish of itself. It's just there. It's letting the applications do the talking without getting in the way.

In the Bible King Agrippa tells Paul, "You almost persuade me to become a Christian." Let's just say I'm "almost persuaded to become an Ubuntu user." We'll see how the rest of the week goes.

[pmonks]

Next stop Vista! ;-)

[Simplicius]

Matt,

in a future post can you tell us something more? I know Lenovo sells Linux laptops in some countries, but yours isn't supported, you say. So who did the install?

[odubtaig]

How's the sound? Running Gutsy on a Lenovo 3000 N200 has been a mixed experience. It found most things properly (including the function keys and the graphics card) but I had to use the nvidia config software before it would actually run with the proper screen resolution (selected 1680x1050 screen in Gnome and it refused to let me select an actual resolution higher than 1400x900), fiddle with configuration files before the Realtek/Intel/Lenovo (whatever it claims to be) HDA sound would work and I haven't got around to the reason the webcam just aborts. There may also be a slight issue with the Bluetooth but I need to confirm this.

Oh, and don't be surprised if everything freezes up with Compiz switched on, it's a known issue with at least some Lenovo laptops, especially if you choose interaggregate as your screensaver... I mean, you go into screensaver config, choose interaggregate and everything just stops.

That asides, I can't find a single O/S I actually like at the moment, too much concentrating on extranous pointless flashy blinky crap at the expense of basic usability (See Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Fedora, Vista, OSX and, oh yeah, Final Cut Express: dozens of fancy transitions and chroma-keying so useless I'm currently compiling half a dozen dependencies for pyGTK so I can get GIMP to batch-process because it does a better job, and with a PDF manual that has chapters for features only available in Pro (Boris Vector Shape Generator for one)).

[john.mark]

Kudos to you, Matt, for jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon. Let me know if I can assist you with that. My adventures with Ubuntu on the MacBook have been surprisingly boring.

[Matt Asay]

The one thing that seems to be going awry is that whenever I wake the machine from sleep, the screen stays very hard to see. I can't get it to brighten up through any means other than restarting it. I'm sure I could go into the guts of Ubuntu to fix the problem, but that would simply prove my earlier point (that Linux is too hard).

[qwerty75]

Linux is too hard?

Jeez, how sad.

Ubuntu is all hype, little substance, try a real Linux distro. Or just go back to windows and let MS do your thinking for you.

[kiwibuntu]

Let's hope Ubuntu is to operating systems what Firefox has been to the web - giving us real competition, innovation, and something to look forward to. I have recently tested Hardy alpha 6 and it already has some extra (very) nice-to-haves compared with Gutsy.

[alderkr]

Matt,

There are some permanent fixes for the backlight issue. Try Googleing "HAL Quirks" "ThinkPad x61". It seems like you need to download a file and put it in a folder somewhere.

A temporary solution is to switch to a virtual terminal by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 and then back to your graphical environment by pressing CTRL+ALT+F7.

I'm typing this from my ThinkPad T61 which is running Fedora 8.

[tdavis312]

I tried Feisty on my new X.61 but had common "job control turned off" issue. I tried the new beta and it works fine but NO wireless network. Doesn't find any wireless. Doesn't seem to try. Switching back to Vista and a dozen wireless networks show up. Does anyone know how to get around this issue. this is the only place I have found folk talking about Ubuntu and the X.61. Thanks