Comment Thinkpad 600E: works great, but it ain't perfect (Score 3) 247
Okay, I've got one of these puppies with all the trimmings (minus the DVD drive), and overall, I *love* the box, though there's a few minor issues.
1. Yeah, the modem. I just use an ethermodem. Yawn.
2. Resetting the pcmcia (as in the case of a pcmcia restart or suspend/resume) causes the audio DMAs to mess up. I have scripts to get around this by reslotting the audio drivers. I consider this more important than the modem.
3. APMD doesn't react properly and has to be disabled.
4. Samba has a tendency toward keeling when you shuffle eth0 around as I often do.
Considering the quality and quantity of glitches even the "Designed for NT" notebooks have under that other OS, I think I'd support labelling it "Works with Linux" but not "100% Linux Compatible".
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the 600s to anyone looking to build a Linux laptop: we've got five 600s in our department running RH & Mandrake Linux with no complaints (and the owners are users, not gurus), not to mention a few 760s and 770s and a couple of Dell Inspirons.
Add VMWare to the mix, and you get a notebook that only needs to be rebooted when you upgrade kernels, runs NT in a window with M$ Office (the de facto standard in world freakin' domination, ugh), and moves from network to dialup to network with the grace of a ballerina.
So IMHO, don't get your collective panties in a bunch. If Red Hat certifies it, though, they'd better release a stack of RPMs to fully enable the kernel and PCMCIA APM for the thing. And IBM had better release full specs if not source code for the modem and at least leave the ball in the Open Source community.
$0.02
1. Yeah, the modem. I just use an ethermodem. Yawn.
2. Resetting the pcmcia (as in the case of a pcmcia restart or suspend/resume) causes the audio DMAs to mess up. I have scripts to get around this by reslotting the audio drivers. I consider this more important than the modem.
3. APMD doesn't react properly and has to be disabled.
4. Samba has a tendency toward keeling when you shuffle eth0 around as I often do.
Considering the quality and quantity of glitches even the "Designed for NT" notebooks have under that other OS, I think I'd support labelling it "Works with Linux" but not "100% Linux Compatible".
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the 600s to anyone looking to build a Linux laptop: we've got five 600s in our department running RH & Mandrake Linux with no complaints (and the owners are users, not gurus), not to mention a few 760s and 770s and a couple of Dell Inspirons.
Add VMWare to the mix, and you get a notebook that only needs to be rebooted when you upgrade kernels, runs NT in a window with M$ Office (the de facto standard in world freakin' domination, ugh), and moves from network to dialup to network with the grace of a ballerina.
So IMHO, don't get your collective panties in a bunch. If Red Hat certifies it, though, they'd better release a stack of RPMs to fully enable the kernel and PCMCIA APM for the thing. And IBM had better release full specs if not source code for the modem and at least leave the ball in the Open Source community.
$0.02
