rdewald's Journal: Debian stable on an IBM X40 Ultra-portable

For the last 18 months we've been giving these IBM X40 Thinkpads to our clinical staff for field documentaion. We are phasing them out in favor of these IBM x60's, because well, when your software is based on .NET, you need the juice.

This phased deployment has given me license to experiment on my own X40, since I plan to move to an X60 soon and the entire disk image on my X40 will be deep-wiped when I upgrade. So, if I break it I just have an excuse to deploy myself an x60 sooner rather than later.

I burned a Debian 3.1r2 net install disk from the iso, put the X40 in the docking station, booted from the CD and let the Debian install process dynamically resize the ntfs partition on the HD, make room (about 6 GB in my case) for the Linux partitions, format them, install the file system, install GRUB, install the packages and dual-boot with the corporate XP Pro installation. It works. The machine is *much* snappier with linux.

The X40 has built-in wireless, so I had to build those drivers from Intel source, which just required signing a EULA granting me precisely the end-user license I desired, but the Debian stable "wireless-tools" package otherwise configures it flawlessly. The external VGA jack works with a projector or I could get X to expand the desktop to it. The docking station works flawlessly. ACPI works I couldn't be more pleasantly surprised.

And this is Debian sarge, stable. The only backport I used was Firefox.

Cool.

oh yeah? uh... big deal

[ellem]

because I um, I installed a Cray XT3 on a Mac SE/30 with 8MB of RAM and um it's like really fast!