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I've gotten the fingerprinter reader working on a T43 a year or 2 ago and I'm sure biometrics have developed well sense then - you should be able to get support with some work. It took me some work, but it ended up working fine. For that Vaio, I believe that series uses a UPEK reader which appears to be relatively well supported:
http://www.upek.com/support/dl_linux_bsp.asp

I used this guide, which should also apply fairly well to your situation as its tho same fingerprint reader I think:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader

Just got a new Thinkpad. Nvidia graphics, Intel networking chipsets. Getting this working properly was a bunch of fucking around, and the wireless networking still isn't quite right.

If you want detailed examples of the pain, check out ThinkWiki or Clemson Linux Initiative.

I love to be able to tweak things endlessly when I'm building a server for maximum performance, so I love the openness and flexibility of Linux. But for a desktop or laptop, I want it to just fucking work, and I've never had that experience on Linux.

I really do not care as much about price as I do about weight. I lugged this: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:G40 around for a while.

Well, you should have got the X40 instead. Still can. Same weight at the Eee 1000, similar speed.
A used X40 with a memory upgrade and new battery is an interesting comparison the these new "bloated" Eee models.

I really do not care as much about price as I do about weight. I lugged this: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:G40 around for a while. Of all the Eee PCs out there the 1000 looks the best. It's light. It comes with a reasonable keyboard. The SSD is just gravy. Imagine walking around downtown Chicago two winters in a row with a G40 weighing you down along with various server/computer parts in your hands during the winter (not to mention all of your tools etc.).

Oh, and for those who did not like my comment: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=601273&cid=24027169 on a previous story; it is now my sig. You just might be too young to get it or have spent too long in your parent's basement. Apologies to those who do not have a basement.

Do you leave your computer on at night? Turn it off, or at least put it in standby. My system, at idle, draws about 600w, when it's in standby it drops to about 30w. That's a HUGE savings on a month or yearly basis.

Sounds to me like you are in need of a new computer. 600W idle consumption? 30W standby? Strange, that, when my main machines (IBM Thinkpad T23's) consume ~30W active, ~1W standby. My server - which is always on - uses about 20W peak and can be (and has been on occasion, eg. while paddling the Yukon) solar-powered. It is based on an old Virgin Webplayer with a 200 MHz Geode processor, and runs web/mail (with spam filtering)/file services. Is it super-fast? No, not really. It does keep up though, which is enough. It is also totally quiet, no cooling fans needed. And it is/was cheap...

I do not play games. If I wanted to I'd have to get something newer and more power hungry (which in itself seems backwards, newer machines should be less power-hungry, not more...) but I do use these machines for large software projects. But at 600W idle I hope you're designing fusion reactors or something similar, otherwise it sounds rather excessive...

I have a Thinkpad 560X, have used mainly as a second notebook. It works very fine and I made many different tests with it. Used with a 10 GB hard Drive with a mixed Windows Xp and Debian alike(Kurumin-br-pt) distribution. also used a CF IDE adaptor with a 1 Gb compact flash with Damn Small Linux. Setup IBM Thinkpad 560X 200 Mhz Pentium MMX 96 MB RAM D-LINK PCMCIA 32 Bit Wireless card 3Com Ethernet 1 USB 1.1 Port No floppy, no CD-ROM http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:560X I also have a ASUS EEEPC. I really recomend older IBM stuff for this purpose.

...IBM introduced the Active Protection System (APS) in 2003.

xrandr. Use version 1.2 or later, and you can have multiple monitors switching pretty easily. I have a T61 with an X3100 in it... it's not fast, but it's certainly no slouch. I have Fn+F7 set up to cycle between Laptop Only, Presentation (1024x768 on both outputs) and multi-monitor, which is the automatic resolution of all connected displays (1440x900 on the laptop, and 1024x768 on my currently connected CRT). The only change I had to make was to put "Virtual 2720 1024" into my xorg.conf file so that the virtual size of the displays was large enough to accommodate all the various options.

Check here for some basic info. There was another place on the 'net that had a more detailed script you could set for the ACPI event, which I used as a base for mine (I did little things like making an xdialog pop up saying what mode the laptop switched into and so on).

xrandr. Use version 1.2 or later, and you can have multiple monitors switching pretty easily. I have a T61 with an X3100 in it... it's not fast, but it's certainly no slouch. I have Fn+F7 set up to cycle between Laptop Only, Presentation (1024x768 on both outputs) and multi-monitor, which is the automatic resolution of all connected displays (1440x900 on the laptop, and 1024x768 on my currently connected CRT). The only change I had to make was to put "Virtual 2720 1024" into my xorg.conf file so that the virtual size of the displays was large enough to accommodate all the various options.

Check here for some basic info. There was another place on the 'net that had a more detailed script you could set for the ACPI event, which I used as a base for mine (I did little things like making an xdialog pop up saying what mode the laptop switched into and so on).

You should be able to do this with xrandr. Don't blame X, blame Ubuntu for not making this obvious.

The last time I did a reinstall was about two months ago. At the time, the driver in the repo would work, but there was no software/keyboard control over the brightness of the LCD. I installed the beta driver directly from NVIDIA, and that fixed it. The current release version might fix that, but I haven't checked.

This site is invaluable for Thinkpads:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/

Although the alternate install CD is needed, at least with the most stable version of Ubuntu, the process is not nearly so complicated. I've done it myself with the help from ThinkWiki. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Ubuntu_Gutsy_Gibbon_on_a_T61p

If you are using the USB cable (much more complicated, I don't recommend), check http://www.gnokii.org/.

If you are using bluetooth (much more simple), take a look at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_setup_Bluetooth.

These places should get you started. You might still need to configure something on your phone, but the real tricks are on the above addresses.

I was going to post this on Thinkpad wiki on power consumpton, but sadly the page is not working atm..

My X40 has a winmodem, but it works perfectly on Linux. The same with the wireless (Intel), video card (Intel also), soundcard etc. I think IBM/Lenovo is doing pretty well on that. You can check http://www.thinkwiki.org/ and you'll see what's supported and what's not in linux.

There's no way, that I know of, to get one with neither although I find it nice to have XP dualboot for a few reasons. However, I bought an X61s (as I learned afterwards, don't bother with the 's' - it's a waste of money) and Ubuntu runs fine.

You get a solid experience "out of the box" (i.e. everything works, and you could be quite happy leaving it 'as is') but you can improve it quite a bit by doing your own tweaking. There are a few minor wireless issues, and the fact that GNOME's "screen brightness" doesn't adjust the backlight but rather just the display pixels (!!). The latter is remedied by installing 'xbacklight' although you lose the friendly Ubuntu/GNOME interface.

Happily, the intel wireless (iwl4965) has good support (open source driver except for a microcode chunk you put in /lib/firmware) and I've not had any problems with the i915 video. It's nice to not have to bother with restricted drivers and I've not had problems with compiz desktop eyecandy except for power consumption and reduced productivity.

I've spent a few hours hacking with PowerTop to get the battery life under ubuntu up from 5h15m to 6h15m with wireless; under XP I still get an extra hour or so. The next kernel should improve a lot of this; who knows when Ubuntu will package it... The wireless also sometimes has an issue on suspend/resume, unless you disable it explicitly in Gnome before suspending (nice ui for this), or patch up the suspend scripts in /etc/acpi. Not as big a deal as it may sound.

The only thing I'm having trouble with atm, is the automatic accelerometer-based hard drive parking. I have the sensor working (tho you have to compile the module yourself), but I can't get the HD-parking daemon to work.

The only serious problem under linux with no "reasonable" workaround seems to be with flashing the BIOS - there are some convoluted ways around it (see below), but I am happy to have my XP partition for this...

Everything I know, I learned here: http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki.

From personal experience with Thinkpads, they are quite Linux-friendly. My old R51e has full hardware support in Linux. The latest version of Ubuntu works fine, in particular, and so does Debian.

From personal experience with Thinkpads, they are quite Linux-friendly. My old R51e has full hardware support in Linux. The latest version of Ubuntu works fine, in particular, and so does Debian.

Now, I'll give you that I'm not using the largest, baddest laptop around. I'm using a Thinkpad T-60 which, as far as 17" display laptops go, is pretty reasonably sized. I had a Dell D810 for awhile, though, which was a monster of a laptop. It still fit my purpose above, though.

Well, no wonder, the T60 isn't a 17" laptop... T60s come with 14.1", 15.0" or 15.4" displays.

Thanks, I didn't find that in the regular product descriptions.

The HPA area isn't that well protected but it would take at least a much smarter kind of criminal, and if you're that smart you could make a living in IT instead (there's an inclination and risk vs reward debate lurking here which I'm leaving aside :-) - that addressed the size issue, although I found that it apparently needs a working copy of Windows re-installed before it can reconstruct itself. This seems to imply that the BIOS component merely kickstarts the install of whatever lives in the HPA, which would makes sense given size constraints.

BIOS resident functions have implications for maintenance as you now have two different parties who have to collaborate for a BIOS patch, so I suspect this is based on some sort of API to keep it manageable. The ugly thing is that Lojack thus appears to have at least identified a potential route to write a TSR (Terminate & Stay resident) trojan, which is a door I would have hoped to stay closed a bit longer. I give it a couple of months before code appears to target that HPA component, and then the fun *really* starts - the moment someone finds a way to crack what's in the HPA you can replace it with your own version of the cookie monster and then all hell will break loose. This approach could offer a bigger industrial espionage backdoor to global information than Windows could ever present by itself.

This could get more interesting than I originally thought..

Thanks for the data.

Where is the room for doubt?

About 4 posts down:

So, if I'm understanding the power.sh script
  correctly it's _not_ this script which causes these frequent load cycles.
  Hence my original report was wrong. Sorry about that.
Some more investigation led me to the following page:
  http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking
  It seems that Hitachi is using some quite aggressive power management.

The only wiggle room is that ACPI is a M$ dissaster where anything is possible because nothing is defined properly.

Exactly. See this article on thinkwiki about the problem. This is obviously HDD or HDD-controller specific, and is therefore a hardware vendor problem, not an Ubuntu problem. The article is FUD.

Well, that Ubuntu bug report is over 1 year old, and according to ThinkWiki, and as confirmed by several people on the thinkpads.com forums, updating the harddrive firmware may well fix the problem.

The Screen and Graphic Preferences is not stable and can mess up your /etc/X11/xorg.conf . It did mess up mine. Your results may vary, but I suggest you stick to xrandr for now. I used it to set up my second monitor on my MacBook. Here's the article I read to learn how to use it: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_6.06.1_on_a_ThinkPad_R60e#Ubuntu_7.10_with_Intel_Graphics_Media_Accelerator_950

I love the Ubuntu community! Oh, that's me... I love me (and all of you for contributing to who I am).

Really? Within moments of googling I found out that to do that you have to use the "fglrx" drivers on your model. I know that driver isn't open sourced, but you'd have to use a closed source driver in Windows to get it working as well..

Here are some relevant links:
Mandriva Wiki which claims compatibility with the t60.
Gentoo User
Ubuntu User w/ xorg.conf

I'd like to help you more, but I'm not a Mandriva user. Good luck with your problem anyway! Next time you buy a laptop, try and get something with easier Linux support.

It's a heck of a lot easier than trying to partition the drive when the menu only gives you the option to either wipe the entire disk or manually install. It's also a lot easier to understand than stuff like getting my SD card reader to work.

For a more general answer, see ThinkWiki. It has a detailed coverage of what hardware used in ThinkPads is supported in Linux one way or another, and to what extent.

They are in fact supported, and you can get to all necessary detail at this site: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Integrated_Fingerpri nt_Reader. There is an open source GPL'd driver, and a closed source driver from the manufacturer of the reader itself. There is also an EXCELLENT article on running Ubuntu on the Thinkpad here http://andrey.thedotcommune.com/thinkpad_t60.html and I simply followed his instructions for Thinkfinger, which is the GPL'd driver.

I have tried and found the GPL'd driver to function well, although I'll note that with Ubuntu 7.04 Fiesty and the Thinkpad T43, although at times it does not function (the "swipe finger" option suddenly and intermittenly is missing from various logins, both GDM and terminal). GDM supports it, KDM does not (so I moved to vanilla Ubuntu, and away from KDE because of this and other 'theme' reasons, the latter being personal preference). I suspect that this occasional dysfunction is related to suspend/resume in some way but am no expert and haven't been able to confirm.

In the end I've personally found vanilla Ubuntu 7.04 to be a real dream on the Thinkpad. Wifi, most keyboard buttons, suspend/hibernate all pretty much work out of the box. With Compiz enabled, video playback is total shite but I can personally put up with that. External video works but is simply a clone of your laptop screen and so is a pain with projectors supporting low resolutions only - for this reason I'm drooling at the thought of the upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 with Xorg 7.3 (including RandR functionality to fix all that shit). Then, I'll be a very happy man.

Offtopic: One really interesting thing is that VMWare Server packages are now in Ubuntu Fiesty. This is really handy if you want to swap to Linux but need Windows for some work related apps. Like many of us, you'll be sure to find that the clock is running way too fast in the Windows guest OS once you're up and running. There's a blog I found http://www.williambrownstreet.net/Linuxblog/index. php?itemid=39 that mentions a 'fix' for this. Quite why EMC can't figure out to include that themselves is beyond me, but there you go - the best of both worlds.

I recently purchased an X61 and I've been happy running Linux on it. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody who isn't very familiar with Linux already.

First of all, Thinkpads don't come with install media. You can make your own, but that's sort of hard if you bought a slimline model like the X61 without a CD drive. The tech support people were ultimately not helpful. They were willing to waive the $40 media fee (Lenovo, WTF?) because my computer doesn't have a disk drive, but it was "too new" for my warranty to be in their database (WTF?) and they couldn't send me the disks.

Still, as long as I didn't touch their initial partition, I reasoned, I could still get back to a factory install. Windows was only a last resort if I couldn't get Linux on there anyway.

The SATA controller had to be put in compatibility mode, unsurprisingly. The wireless worked in Ubuntu when I backported the Gutsy kernel, but the screen brightness control stoped working with the Gutsy kernel. So I tried Fedora 7.

In Fedora 7 (32 bit version), wireless worked out of the box once all the kernel updates were installed (mostly worked that is -- reboot and "modprobe -r iwl4965; modprobe iwl4965" often).

I can't get sound working even with the CVS copy of the "patch_analog.c" from alsa cvs copied into the alsa driver source. Others have had more success with this.

Suspend (often) works after following the instructions for a T61 linked from here. Of course, 50% of the time the machine will crash coming out of suspend, so I'm going to try the instructions here and see how it goes.

I haven't even tried to get all the keyboard function buttons working.

Most of their recent releases will either fix/patch bugs, support newer cards, break previous features or increase/decrease performance -- including this one. For example, version 8.31.5 broke suspend and cpu usage for video has increased in recent versions. Support for AIGLX still hasn't been included.

I really hope this pushes ATI to push feature development and improve their QA on the drivers so that performance and features are maintained between releases.

I have several issues with ATI drivers and my thinkpad t42p. All of them are listed in http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problems_with_fglrx ... and all of them are critical. I mean like screen flickering and hang on loggin out. I simple can't use the driver with such bugs!
These bugs are filed for 1.5 year by now. I don't care if ATI has better developing circle or not.
When all problems will be solved?
When I can use TV-OUT with my ATI card under linux again?.. And don't tell me about IP. IBM, for example, released drivers as open source and it's comes with xorg by default.
I simple don't recommend buying ATI cards to anyone. The better alternatives are exist.

I heard somehwere that these can run Linux.

screen: worked, but sometimes switches to 1024x768 when waking from sleep

Yeah, I'm not 100% sure what the problem is, but I encountered it with a Dell and XP as well. My workaround was to lock the screen first. The login screen after waking may be in the wrong res, but after entering your password, Windows will restore the correct resolution. It only happened to me when I suspended the laptop by closing the lid, though. My suspicion is that when the lid's closed, the graphics card is turned off, then Windows can't query it for its resolution and falls back to some sort of default.

volume buttons: worked, except the "mute" button mutes but doesn't unmute (the "volume up" button works fine for that, however)

This is a "feature," meaning it's the intended behavior. If you were to run XP with the Lenovo drivers, the behavior would be the same. You use the volume buttons to unmute. It sounds silly, but it means you can always hit the mute button and know that the laptop will be muted afterwards. Makes sense for a business laptop, which all Thinkpads are, first and foremost.

fingerprint scanner: probably doesn't work, but haven't looked into it

There's information on getting it to work here, though I haven't tried it. I don't know what it is about me, but for some reason electronics will just not take my fingerprints.

...on some of their newer Thinkpads. You'd think that when you're spending $2000 on a "business-class" laptop, you'd get it without any artificial limitations...

Beware that hardware virtualization requires BIOS support as well as CPU support. I've come across a number of laptops that come with virtualization-capable CPUs that you can't make use of due to lack BIOS support for. See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_disable d_VT for some more info.

Problem number one: CPU crippled by Lenovo. Is this model also affected?
(Short story: Lenovo disabled hardware virtualization in BIOS, one of selling point of Core processors)

Yes the X-series tablet will run linux distro's to your hearts content, however like I said many of the features will be unavailable, including any of the ThinkVantage Technologies that Lenovo puts on them such as the RapidRestore, or Access Connections programs. http://www.thinkwiki.org/

I absolutely agree.
Don't blame linux. Ask vendors to publish driver's specifications.
People will write drivers themselves.
Look at IBM way of writing drivers:
ipw2200.sourceforge.net. You won't find much problem. You will find a lot of fixes right away.

And compare it with a close source ATI driver for linux:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problems_with_fglrx

Isn't it a good example?
ATI themselves can write a proper driver for linux. They was 4 month slow to change API for xorg 7.1, some crashes/hangs bugs are in a unofficial ATI's bugtrack system for more then 1 YEAR!

This is nothing to do with linux.

Just a point, on breezy it appears that the info captured in the info file is the FRU *not* the ASM P/N.

In addition, even if the battery P/N match it does not necessarily mean that the battery is subject to a recall. I spent a couple of hours this morning and of the 15 or so batteries with the ASM:92P1088 FRU:92P1089 match only 3 were subject to a recall. However http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Tp_smapi/ looks very interesting in this regard.

As usual, a Slashdotter doesn't grasp the difference betwen "generally useful" and "useful to me".

On the contrary, but I don't much care about "generally useful", being a "me" rather than a "general". Usefulness to the Word-typing Explorer-clicking masses is a spectator sport, in the meantime I've got work to do.

That said, Thinkpads are famed for their long history of linux compatability, quite a large crowd makes happy use of that middle mouse button in linux. Laptops, especially leading-edge ones, can be a tricky beast in linux, but thinkpads are easier than most.

/me raises my hand

Our corporate IT staff refreshed us with a T42, but the software image didn't have the trackpoint wizard or whatever it's called. A few phone calls and I was able to disable the bloody thing - if you're a power typer, you will find yourself quickly losing focus from your working window as the heel of your hand exerts force on the trackpad and emulates a double-click.

My [personal] T23 doesn't have it, and they can have it when they pry my cold dead fingers from around it (well, as soon as I replace the fluorescent lamp.) It has the dreaded red tint on the screen and someday I will be annoyed enough to get it fixed, but I love it.

For more information on the fingerprint reader see: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Integrated_Fingerpri nt_Reader. As mentioned already it works great as a PAM element and isn't all that hard to get running.

Also in general ThinkTWiki is a very good site for information about Thinkpads and LINUX.

Surely, you mean the ThinkPad Button?

I'm also hoping this extends to over ThinkPads in some form. I have the T60 (similar but an ATI graphics adapter) and would like some of these features when I run SLED 10. I'm particularly interested in getting power management similar to what we get in Windows, with full suspend mode support, better special key support, etc.

More magic here

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

Lenovo have already done this for Thinkpads - see ThinkPad Advanced Dock

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Advanced_Do ck

discussion of how well it works at:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=22358
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=25584

I've had my Thinkpad T30 for about 3 years now and I think it is the best laptop I have ever used. Before that, I used a Thinkad 765D (which I still have). At work, we used IBM hardware, so when I wanted my own laptop, I bought one direct from IBM. Sure it was more expensive, but I never regretted it. Linux driver support was always there so I never had any serious problem getting the hardware working. I really wish IBM didn't sell their laptop division, as I don't think anyone else could produce a product with the same support and durability of the Thinkpads that I own. I don't know about the R series you've dealt with, but the T series and the ones before it were excellent machines.